Every way possible. In this video, the folks at Wired dig into research and find out things like “why the prefrontal cortex shuts down during improvisation. ‘It’s not just something that happens in clubs and jazz bars. … It’s actually maybe the most fundamental form of what it means to be human.'”- Wired
The Egyptian Artist Who Was Really An Israeli Spying For Mossad
“In the early 1950s, a Mossad agent named Shlomo Cohen-Abravanel was sent to Egypt, under the cover-story that he was a French abstract painter named Charduval. Abravanel’s fake artist persona was so successful that he scored a small solo exhibition at Cairo’s Museum of Modern Art, while the actual Abravanel went on to design the Mossad’s official emblem.”
Research: Successful Bands Do Better With Married Members
It looks like we owe Yoko an apology. New research finds rock bands have more critical and commercial success if they contain a mix of married and single musicians.
Dutch Poets And Stonemasons Are Carving A Never-Ending Poem Into A City Street
“Called De Letters van Utrecht, the ‘social sculpture’ is constantly evolving and continues to expand every Saturday afternoon when one of 22 stone carvers from a local guild chisels a single letter into the stone. As the weeks, months, and years pass by, the poem evolves, continuing indefinitely so long as the city and community members support it.”
Are All Artists Liberal? So Where Are The Conservatives?
When we in the arts champion “diversity, equity and inclusion,” do we mean everyone? Do we mean conservatives? Religiously, culturally or otherwise? Are conservative artists not identifying as artists because the arts are a predominantly liberal sector?
Meep Meep! Where The Road Runner, Fred Flintstone’s Car, And Other Classic Cartoons’ Sounds Came From
“In this episode of Watch Smarter, Slate‘s video series about hidden tropes in pop culture and beyond, we trace the surprising history of cartoon sounds we all know but have never quite understood. Our story begins with live orchestras in the 1920s and ends, more or less, inside a coke bottle.”
2,000-Year-Old Mosaics Turn Up Under Lawn Of Florida Museum
No, they’re not previously unknown Native American art, we’re afraid. They’re first- and second-century Greco-Roman works from Antioch, and five of them were among the first pieces acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg. “One was embedded in a fountain in the sculpture garden. One went on display in the Membership Garden. One was stowed under the stage of the Marly Room. Someone – it’s unclear who – buried the remaining two in the lawn outside the gates of the sculpture garden sometime in 1989.” It seems no one knows why.
Royal Shakespeare Co. Revives Forgotten Female Playwright From 300 Years Ago
Mary Pix was born in 1666 (the year of the Great Fire of London), had her first big London successes in 1696, and went on to write an estimated 13 plays (both tragedies and comedies) and one novel, despite the opposition of what we might as well call the patriarchy. A retitled production of her 1700 script The Beau Defeated opens this month at Stratford-upon-Avon.
The Ingenious Distribution System Cubans Use To Replace The Internet They Can’t Access
“Cuba has one of the lowest rates of internet usage in the Western Hemisphere, and access to media is strictly restricted – but that doesn’t stop Cubans from watching Game of Thrones. Their secret is El Paquete Semanal (‘The Weekly Packet’), a clandestine in-person file-sharing network that distributes hard drives and flash drives full of media.”
Court Gives Verdict In Suit Against Facebook For Censoring Courbet’s ‘Origin Of The World’
“French schoolteacher Frédéric Durand-Baïssas … says the social media giant closed his account in 2011 because he posted L’Origine du monde (The Origin of the World, 1866), [the history-making] explicit full-frontal female nude.” The French judge did rule that French users could sue Facebook in France rather than California, but was less than sympathetic to Durand-Baïssas’s claims for damages.
What Happened To Alienation? It Used To Be A Staple Of Literature
After the Second World War, alienation came to betoken a near-universal spiritual and psychological malaise. Existentialist philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre used it to describe a fundamental aspect of the human condition. Novelists such as Albert Camus, the author of The Stranger (1942), demonstrated its effects in the indifferent numbness of casual violence. By the time J D Salinger released his novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951), a chronicle of adolescent estrangement featuring the anti-hero Holden Caulfield, alienation was invoked to explain everything from juvenile delinquency and galloping divorce rates to voter apathy and substance abuse. The term was taken to define the fundamental pathology of modern life.
2018’s Great British University Strike: The Lecturers Rebel
The goad for this stunningly resolute strike was deep cuts to retirement pensions, but as in all such vast, spontaneous outpourings from below, the issue is not the issue. The issue, rather, is the deteriorating quality of work life and morale in the higher-education sector. The Great University Strike of 2018 is a powerful statement on behalf of intellectual and humane values, new university priorities, and organizational structures and norms that better embody the principles of dignity, transparency, respect, and democracy.
Behind The Firing Of LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art Chief Curator
Behind the scenes, according to several sources close to the museum who were interviewed by artnet News, Molesworth’s personal priorities, progressive politics, and constitutional aversion to flattering donors put her on a collision course with the museum’s director and board. Ultimately, they said, the competing agendas and approaches proved irreconcilable, and the situation became untenable.
Female Directors Are Finally Starting To Get Traction In Sci-Fi
Katherine Bigelow made Strange Days ($42 million budget) more than 20 years ago. Excepting the Wachowski siblings’ Cloud Atlas and Jupiter Ascending (they got their Hollywood cred from the Matrix series, which they made when they were male), it took until Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman and Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time for Hollywood to let a woman helm a big-budget science-fiction feature. (Another one, Claire Denis’s High Life, is on the way.) Anne Billson looks at the trouble female filmmakers have had making headway in high-end science fiction – and at the numerous interesting efforts they’ve made on low budgets.
Community Theatre Putting On Play ‘With Holocaust Themes’ Gets Hate Calls
Since the new play opened last weekend, the Footlights Theatre in Falmouth, Maine, has been getting hate calls. “I had one woman tell me, ‘I don’t want to see a play about those (expletive) Jews,” the executive artistic director says. He sent an email out to supporters: “I need people to know this is happening. … It’s not an open invitation to hate again.”
Emily Nasrallah, ‘Icon Of Literature And Lebanese Creativity,’ Has Died At 86
Nasrallah was a journalist, teacher, lecturer and novelist who advocated for women’s rights and wrote about refugees and war in Lebanon. Her books “recount the emptiness left by immigration, the women left behind by men seeking a better life beyond war-torn Lebanon, the parents abandoned by children desperate to fulfill the dreams they had been denied.”
People Don’t Agree On What Morality Is Or Whether It Exists, But We Still Teach It
Why? And how? “We might deny that morality needs to be taught, putting our faith in the natural goodness of children or their propensity to discover and sign up to moral standards of their own accord. Or we might bite the indoctrination bullet and resolve to inculcate a selected moral code and associated justification. … Or we might decline to educate in morality and simply educate about it. … But the objections to these responses are obvious, and serious.”
Are We In A Time Of Anomaly – Or A Breakthrough Time For Women Directing Big-Budget Science Fiction Films?
One problem is simply the numbers in the U.S. – single digits for women directors, compared to women being 1/4 of directors in France, for instance. And then, of course, “sci-fi is still fiercely defended masculine territory. The word “science” doesn’t help, judging by men’s rights movement support for James Damore, the Google engineer fired for claiming the gender imbalance in the science and technology sectors was due to biological differences. Or for the Sad Puppies movement agitating for a return to pre-diversity science fiction. Or never-ending Gamergate nonsense, or whingeing about Star Wars being sullied by women or people of colour. Sci-fi is a cultural Custer’s Last Stand for bigotry.”
After 33 Years, Chicago’s American Theatre Company Abruptly Shuts Its Doors
The theatre took down its website and all of its social media at the same time the announcement went out on a Friday morning. “The unsigned statement from ATC’s board (which declined interview requests) praised [AD Will] Davis while implying a downturn in ticket sales under his tenure: ‘Despite the innovative, engaging and inclusive approach to ATC that current artistic director Will Davis brought to our theater, which continued to garner a positive reception for our productions and educational programs, the theater has suffered from a reduction in earned revenue.'”
Where Is Pop Music’s MeToo Movement?
They tried to have a panel about it during SXSW. But even the panel showed the problem: “Issues surrounding sexual harassment and misconduct are one of the greatest challenges facing not only the entertainment business but the culture at large. Yet the single most topical panel at SXSW, an event that attracts more than 70,000 registered attendees over its 10-day run, was relegated to one of the Austin Convention Center’s smaller meeting rooms.” And most attendees of SXSW were at booze-fueled parties at the same time. What’s next?
Kate Wilhelm, Groundbreaking Science Fiction Writer Who Co-Founded The Clarion Writers Workshop, Has Died At 89
Wilhelm was a trailblazer, “one of the few women writing science fiction under their own names in the 1960s, and her books quickly gained a following as well as awards. Unlike many of her colleagues, she straddled genres, between futuristic fantasies and enigmatic mystery novels. She set her science fiction in the near term and imposed present-day sensibilities.”
Austria Gets A Quiet, And Disquieting, Reminder Of Its Nazi Past
Amid the emergence of a far-right, anti-refugee coalition government in the country, “the Scottish artist Susan Philipsz is using the eerie sound of fingers rubbed on water-filled glasses to remind visitors of Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria 80 years ago. On March 12, 1938, Austrians cheered German troops as they marched into the country, and three days later, tens of thousands on the Heldenplatz saluted Hitler as he addressed them from the palace balcony.”
In Britain, Only Thirty Percent Of Students Think Arts Degrees Are A Good Value For The Money
And this is from the students themselves, who ranked arts degrees above language, history, and philosophy. This may be more a reflection of the schools than the subject, however. One student: “I fail to see where my money has been spent other than on new campus development, staffing and subsidising degrees in other disciplines.”
Opera Singers Need Gowns, But Opera Students Don’t Have Money. Here’s One Solution
Basically, women with money donate gowns, and the students at Juilliard get to go “shopping” when the racks of designer wear come in. The students “are expected to be outfitted in fancy attire at their many auditions and performances, as well as at galas and parties. These singers try to avoid being photographed in the same ensemble twice.”
Pittsburgh Is Ready To Replace A Statue Many Have Called Racist With A Statue Of A Black Woman
The status to be moved is of songwriter Stephen Foster – and, in words written at the time the status was created in 1900, “an old darkey reclining at his feet strumming negro airs upon an old banjo.” Pittsburgh residents now get to vote about, or at least give an opinion on, which of seven candidates should get a statue in its place.