Month: July 2018

Keeping Alive Armenia’s Centuries-Old Tradition Of Shadow Puppetry

The genre known as Karagyoz (meaning “black eyes,” after the trickster character at the center of the shadow plays) developed in the 14th century in the Ottoman Empire and became especially popular in Armenia in the 1700s. Now a troupe called Ayrogi is reviving the traditional art, often traveling through Armenia on horseback to perform in villages throughout the country.

Giant Scientific Publisher Cuts Off Scientists In Sweden And Germany From Access To Papers

Elsevier last week stopped thousands of scientists in Germany from reading its recent journal articles, as a row escalates over the cost of a nationwide open-access agreement. Negotiators in Germany and Sweden want all their papers published in Elsevier journals to be open access as part of any new contracts. They have said that they will not pay more than they did previously for subscriptions. But, until now, the Dutch publisher has offered other countries read-and-publish deals that cover only a small proportion of a country’s publishing output.

How ‘Sorry To Bother You’ Found (And Used) Its White Voice

The premise of director Boots Riley’s movie is the largely unearned success that the black characters gain when they use a “white voice.” And, as Danny Glover’s character tells his young telemarketing colleague, “I’m not talking Will Smith–white. I’m talking about the real deal” — meaning with dubbed-in dialogue spoken by white actors sounding their absolute whitest. Hunter Harris reports on how Riley came up with and implemented the idea.

How Frida Kahlo Created Frida Kahlo

“It’s a well-known fact that Kahlo would revise her year of birth (1907, according to her birth certificate), to align it with the eruption of the Revolution in 1910; what we don’t tend to appreciate is the way in which she consciously drew on Mexico’s religious and cultural traditions to shape her political and self-expression. Kahlo may have scoffed at a photograph of her solemn younger self dressed elaborately for church but, as time went by, forms of ritual, Catholic iconography, and cultural memory would structure her highly personal responses to her changing country.”

A Sign Language Developed Spontaneously By Deaf Kids Entirely On Their Own

“Of all the changes within Nicaragua to come out of the overthrow of the Somoza regime by the Sandinistas in 1979, perhaps the least anticipated was the birth of a new language. Nicaraguan Sign Language is the only language spontaneously created, without the influence of other languages, to have been recorded from its birth. And though it came out of a period of civil strife, it was not political actors but deaf children who created the language’s unique vocabulary, grammar, and syntax.”

What’s Lost When Great Private Art Collections Break Up

Noah Charney: “When the collections are dispersed, the art remains extant, but the story told by the collection dissipate. It is rather like an archaeological site — objects found within, undisturbed, tell a story based on their context. The same objects can tell their own, individual stories, but the tale of how they were gathered and arranged together can be lost if they are viewed outside of the find site, in museum vitrines.”

What’s The Problem With Americans’ Love Of Happy Endings? When It Collides With Real Life

Using as examples the recent reunion – enthusiastically captured and craftily edited by CNN – of a Salvadoran refugee woman with the six-year-old daughter ICE separated from her as well as the cute-turned-creepy-turned-cruel viral tale known as #PlaneBae, Megan Garber considers “how easily the desire for a happy ending can insinuate itself on the facts of the matter. The possibility at play … is that the full story, and its attendant horrors, will get washed away in the easy rituals of false closure. It is that people will forget, because the logic of the happy ending has given them permission to be preoccupied.”