Month: July 2018

The Women Of Rare Books

Although it’s true that old white men have always run the large, moneyed, century-old rare-book trade—buying and selling books for a living—women have made enormous inroads as private and institutional collectors. Things started shifting in the seventies. Second-wave feminism gave women a voice, and female collectors started patching the historical holes by seeing value and relevance in objects that men had ignored. When you put your gaze on a manuscript and call attention to it, you create value in the eyes of others. Curiosity creates a market.

Are Branded Projects A Threat To Theatre… Or An Opportunity?

Ironically, this idea of shows presented by consumer product companies, while relatively rare for theatre, harks back to the days of radio and the early years of television, when brands were often intimately involved in sponsoring programming as part of their marketing efforts. It wasn’t surprising to hear that such and such a series was “brought to you by” a single sponsor – and sometimes those sponsors held sway over the content of the shows as well, sometimes resulting, as we later learned, in meddling and outright censorship.

Just How Many People Could The Earth Support?

We have been engineering our environments to more productively serve human needs for tens of millennia. We cleared forests for grasslands and agriculture. We selected and bred plants and animals that were more nutritious, fertile and abundant. It took six times as much farmland to feed a single person 9,000 years ago, at the dawn of the Neolithic revolution, than it does today, even as almost all of us eat much richer diets. What the palaeoarcheological record strongly suggests is that carrying capacity is not fixed. It is many orders of magnitude greater than it was when we began our journey on this planet.

Australian Theatre Producer Tackles Broadway, The West End And Sydney WIth Four Big Musicals

The financial risks, which the company shares with investors in the productions, are considerable. The four productions are expected to cost about $75 million to mount — “King Kong” alone is budgeted for up to $36.5 million, and “Moulin Rouge!” for up to $28 million, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Should We Be Looking To The Aztecs For Our Philosophy Of How The World Works?

While Plato and Aristotle were concerned with character-centred virtue ethics, the Aztec approach is perhaps better described as socially-centred virtue ethics. If the Aztecs were right, then ‘Western’ philosophers have been too focused on individuals, too reliant on assessments of character, and too optimistic about the individual’s ability to correct her own vices. Instead, according to the Aztecs, we should look around to our family and friends, as well as our ordinary rituals or routines, if we hope to lead a better, more worthwhile existence.

‘Yellow Submarine’ At 50: The Beatles’ Candy-Colored Cartoon Utopia

“The fantastical story of the Pepperlanders and the Blue Meanie menace is resistance cinema in the truest sense, albeit in a register so idealistic it barges past the point of naïveté. … A children’s film about pacifism winning out over imperialist annihilation might seem an odd combination, but in the cannabis haze after the Summer of Love, nothing made more sense.”