“Quiet confusion was in the air around the entrance to the museum – ‘What the heck is a tort?’ a man whispered to his wife as they walked in. She wasn’t sure. … Tort law is essentially the law of personal injury, and the museum’s mission is to restore the idea that personal-injury law is not a way to line the pockets of a few lucky lawyers but rather a way to hold the powerful to account. (The most popular exhibit was dedicated to explaining the McDonald’s hot-coffee lawsuit.)”
Month: October 2015
Pascal’s Wager 2.0
“Pascal’s famous wager requires a choice between believing and not believing in God. But there’s more than one way not to believe.”
‘The Return of Foxy Grandpa’ – An Unpublished T.S. Eliot Essay
“We publish here for the first time T.S. Eliot’s review of two books by the English mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead … Foxy Grandpa was the title character of a popular American newspaper comic strip (1900-1918), in which Grandpa consistently outwitted his two trickster grandsons.”
Strong Female Leads Make Audiences Uncomfortable, Says Leading Director
Vicky Featherstone, artistic director of London’s Royal Court Theatre: “We haven’t seen a female King Lear, we haven’t seen a female Willy Loman, we haven’t seen a female Hamlet. People haven’t written those plays yet. And when they do write them, or when they try …, people don’t receive the play very positively.”
Do Strong Female Leads Really Put Audiences Off? Ask Rosalind, Lady Bracknell, And Mama Rose
“Does Vicky Featherstone speak for us all when she says ‘we don’t know whether we’re very good yet at watching a female narrative’? Audiences who queued up for and gave standing ovations to Gillian Anderson’s Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, Imelda Staunton in Gypsy, or Kristin Scott Thomas’s Electra might disagree.”
Mike Nichols’s Life And Career: The Definitive Oral History
“A glittering cast of Nichols’s friends share with Sam Kashner and Charles Maslow-Freen their stories of a refugee from Hitler’s Germany who lived his own inimitable version of the American Dream. Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep, Dustin Hoffman, and more remember the comic genius, a groundbreaking director and true bon vivant.”
World Ballet Day Is Here: 24 Hours Of Free Live Streaming On Oct. 1
“For the second year, five top ballet companies from around the world” – Australian Ballet, Bolshoi Ballet, Royal Ballet, National Ballet of Canada, and San Francisco Ballet (plus pre-recorded half-hour programs by Houston Ballet and Pacific Northwest Ballet) – “are joining for a day of free live streaming of their work, rehearsals, and performances.”
To Attract Millennials, Oregon Ballet Theatre Partners With Hipsters’ Favorite Beer
“Oregon Ballet Theatre’s latest marketing campaign features a bare-chested, on-pointe ballet dancer sharing the stage with a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon in full efface derriere. The sales pitch: ‘Come watch ballet. We’ll give you a beer.’ Too obvious?”
‘The Lady Gaga Of The 1920s’
“Eddie Redmayne is already being Oscar-tipped for his latest role in Tom Hooper’s biopic, The Danish Girl – the story of the painter Einar Wegener, who underwent the world’s first gender-reassignment operation to become Lili Elbe. But there was another woman behind Einar and Lili.”
Will They Or Won’t They? The Epistolary Not-Quite-Romance Of Eudora Welty And Ross MacDonald
“By the time they became acquainted, in 1970, both were well established in their fields – Welty in that nebulous genre called Southern literature, and Macdonald in hard-boiled detective fiction. … With the ice broken, Welty and Millar struck up an epistolary friendship that endured until his death in 1983, exchanging some 345 letters. … Can it come as any surprise, then, that these letters occasionally read like the prelude to a courtship?”