For all the high-profile success of shows about urban grit (The Wire, Boardwalk Empire), serial killers (Dexter), and vampires (True Blood), “there is no guarantee the mass audiences that tune into broadcast networks – or their advertisers – will be as enthusiastic.”
Month: May 2012
Houghton Mifflin Files For Bankruptcy Protection
“Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishers Inc, whose textbooks have been a staple in American schoolhouses for decades” – and which publishes such evergreens as the Curious George series and Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy – “filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Monday after agreeing with creditors to eliminate $3.1 billion of debt.”
Philip K. Dick, Visionary (This Is Not A Metaphor)
Beginning in 1974 (following dental surgery), the science-fiction author “experienced and indeed enjoyed a couple of nightlong psychedelic visions with phantasmagoric visual light shows. These hypnagogic episodes continued off and on, together with hearing voices and prophetic dreams, until his death eight years later at age 53. … Now, was this just bad acid or good sodium pentothal?” (Or something else altogether?)
Long Upheaval In Nepal Changes Country’s Art Scene
A ten-year civil war, the end of monarchy and subsequent political turmoil have begun to transform what had been Nepal’s tradition-heavy and somewhat stultified visual arts. For instance, one recent, and representativce, mural added to mountain peaks and curlicue winds a gas pump, a retreating bus, and a visa to somewhere abroad.
Paris’s Shakespeare & Co. Perks Up, Thanks To Next-Generation Owner
Sylvia Beach Whitman, whose father, longtime owner George Whitman, died in December at 98, now hosts readings, small concerts, and festivals at the legendary little English-language bookshop. She still lets young writers and artists sleep there (at what they call “Hotel Tumbleweed”), but she has the place cleaned properly, and she’s put in (just imagine!) a cash register.
Annoying Children’s Questions (‘Why? Why?’) Are Important Brain Development Tools
“Is this process infuriating? Yes. But is it crucial to their development? Far more than most of us think. … Conversation – and question asking – allows young children to grasp highly abstract concepts, from religion to history, at an earlier age. … [And] the way young children learn can vary surprisingly between working-class and middle-class children, and people from different ethnic backgrounds.”
Leaky Roof Drain Stops The Show At Miami’s Arsht Center
Shortly after internmission at last night’s performance of The Lion King, the audience was told to evacuate. [B]uckets dotted the lobby’s floor and water dripped from light fixtures.” Flooding on the roof following a 1-2″ rainstorm (common in a Miami summer) caused a drain pipe leak.
What TED Has Devolved Into (A Brief Polemic)
Alex Pareene: “At this point TED is a massive, money-soaked orgy of self-congratulatory futurism, with multiple events worldwide, awards and grants to TED-certified high achievers, and a list of speakers that would cost a fortune if they didn’t agree to do it for free out of public-spiritedness.”
What The Ancient Olympic Games Were Really Like
Sure, there were lots of naked men racing and wrestling, and basically no women allowed, but there were also religious processions and animal sacrifices, poetry recitations and philosophy lectures, an enormous (and poorly sanitized) campsite, and – of course – brothels.
Can Architecture Fix Urban Problems – Like Murders? (Maybe)
“Around the world, followers of architecture with a capital A have focused so much of their attention on formal experiments, as if aesthetics and social activism, twin Modernist concerns, were mutually exclusive. But MedellÃn is proof that they’re not, and shouldn’t be. Architecture, here and elsewhere, acts as part of a larger social and economic ecology, or else it elects to be a luxury, meaningless except to itself.”