“The people who helped me the most were the librarians,” Cummings told Steve Kroft in a 60 Minutes interview broadcast in January of this year, adding that the public library was the only integrated institution in his neighborhood. – School Library Journal
Author: Douglas McLennan
Argentina Believed It Found A Trove Of Nazi Artifacts. Experts Aren’t so Sure
Police came across the more than 80 objects by accident during a house search of an antiques dealer in a suburb of Buenos Aires. They include daggers with swastikas, a ouija board and magnifying glass that were said to have been used by Hitler himself. – Der Spiegel
Painting Spotted In Woman’s Kitchen Sells At Auction For $26 Million
An auctioneer spotted the painting in June while inspecting a woman’s house in Compiegne in northern France and suggested she bring it to experts for an evaluation. It hung on a wall between the kitchen and dining room. – Washington Post (AP)
A Tiny Bookshop On The Greek Island Of Santorini Fights To Stay “Authentic”
Over the last 15 years, as cruise-ship hoards and souvenir schlock have overrun the village of Oia on Santorini’s northern tip, Atlantis Books has become an unlikely oasis of authenticity and cultural sanity. – The New York Times
Why Are The NYT, WSJ And Others Making TV Shows?
“So what are newspapers and web producers up to, besides making extremely expensive pivots-to-video? And why are these outlets willing to bet people like their journalism enough to watch entire TV shows about it? Maybe it’s because they aren’t really about journalism. The best producers money can buy aren’t interested in “all the news that’s fit to print.” What works best on television is one kind of journalism that has a long track record of success, especially for the big-city tabloid newspapers.” – The Baffler
Rowan Williams: How Poetry Clarifies Our Language
As Auden says, poetry is “a way of happening”. It takes the passage of time, the reality of loss, the absorption in a sharpened kind of seeing or hearing, and makes all these into speech that can survive (as Auden also insists) and help others survive. Its task of “turning noise into music” is thus irreducibly political, a sustained resistance to commodified, generalised language and the appalling reductions of human possibility that this brings with it. Far from being a decorative adjunct to social or public life, it represents the possibilities to which all intelligent and humane social life should point. “Poetry saves the world every day.” – New Statesman
NY Is Trying To Diversify Its Monuments. Not So Easy, It Turns Out
Under Mayor Bill de Blasio and his wife, Chirlane McCray, the city is aiming to build monuments at an unusually rapid rate to honor women, people of color and others previously overlooked. But the effort has become far more contentious than expected, as a diverse, vocal and highly opinionated city fights over the legacy it should leave in bronze and stone. – The New York Times
What Your Brain Looks Like When You’re Improvising
“What do the brains of jazz musicians look like as they create their art on the fly? Using an fMRI machine, Dr. Charles Limb found that activity in the medial prefrontal cortex shot up, while activity in the lateral prefrontal cortex plummeted. In short, the area of the brain responsible for self-monitoring shut off, and the source of self-expression lit up.” – Fast Company
Can Pompeii Be Saved From The Tourists?
Since concerted excavations began in the middle of the 18th century, Pompeii’s rich homes, tombs and public buildings have been plundered by looters, exploited by profit-hungry private excavators, and (in some early cases) “restored” so aggressively as to spoil the original treasures. – The New York Times
Expanding MoMA, Expanding Art
James Russell: “MoMA has long built its origin story of Euro-American Modernism around its great holdings, but that story no longer consists of a single, mainly male, heroic narrative. Instead, the visitor discovers many stories braided together that now include many riveting works by women and people of color. These choices better recognize modernism (small m) as a global cultural and social force that at its best is democratizing and inclusive.” – CityLab