“In surveys conducted in 2002 and 2011, pollsters at Gallup found that members of the American public massively overestimated how many people are gay or lesbian. In 2002, a quarter of those surveyed guessed upwards of a quarter of Americans were gay or lesbian (or “homosexual,” the third option given). By 2011, that misperception had only grown, with more than a third of those surveyed now guessing that more than 25 percent of Americans are gay or lesbian.”
Month: June 2012
Funds To Bail Out Artists
“It turns out that a number of small, private rescue funds have been lending a hand to a group that is definitely not in the too-big-to-fail camp: writers, artists and other creative types. Think of these funds as sort of a TARP for the arts crowd, only with much smaller dollar figures, and with little or no help from Washington.”
Why Americans Will Pay More To Live Where They Can Walk
“Looking at the Washington, D.C., region, they’ve calculated that moving from a Level 1 to a Level 2 walkable neighborhood (from a non-walkable place to a slightly less non-walkable one), you will wind up paying $301.76 a month more in rent for a similar home. If you’re really moving up in the world – from, say, that car-dependent exurb to a Georgetown flat – that means the premium to live in a walkable urban community may run you as much as $1,200 a month.”
Annie Liebovitz, Portrait Photographer Extraordinaire, Has A New Book With No People In It
“‘It was great to be in rooms without people, like a meditation of sorts,’ she says. ‘I think of the great society portrait painter Wright of Derby who at the end of his life finished up painting cow pastures because he’d just had it with people. I do think we all head there.'”
Some Large Cosmic Event Happened In The 8th Century, But We Don’t Know What It Was
Tree rings confirm that something, and something huge, happened in the cosmos – and it affected the Earth’s atmosphere. But what was it?
Is (Almost) Everything We Think We Know About The Origins Of Islam Wrong?
A new book says yes. Historian Tom Holland “says that while there’s no doubt some historical accuracy in the sources for early Islam, those documents are more likely to be reflecting conditions at the time of their writing in the ninth and 10th centuries.”
You’ll See The London Symphony Orchestra At The Olympics, But You Won’t Hear It
Actually, you will hear the musicians – on a recording they made six weeks ago, to which they must mime during the opening ceremonies for the London Olympics.
Turkey Charges Pianist For His Tweets
“A court [in Istanbul] on Friday charged Fazil Say, a classical and jazz pianist with an international career, with insulting Islamic values in Twitter messages, the latest in a series of legal actions against Turkish artists, writers and intellectuals for statements they have made about religion and Turkish national identity.”
What’s It Like To Be The Literary Executor Of Your Hero?
“[Edward] Mendelson’s special connection with Auden was studiously based on the work, and what it revealed of Auden’s world view, his ideas on poetry, art, religion and morality. To hear Mendelson expound on Auden is to hear a man who, over four decades of scholarship, has caught the cast of another’s mind perfectly, deeply, and eloquently. Even though he never knew it then, in that 20-year-old dumbstruck student, WH Auden had found a clearer afterlife than the rest of us will ever manage to find.”
Controversy Revisited As Paul Simon’s ‘Graceland’ Turns 25
The album defined South African township sound for a generation – but along with its success at getting the word out about black musicians came Simon’s deliberate choice to ignore a cultural boycott, not to mention accusations of appropriation. What do we think now, a quarter-century later?