And why would we care? “We do know a few things about Shakespeare’s relationship with books. He wrote plays according to a method that has been labeled plagiaristic; “appropriative” is a more polite term, and historically more accurate.” – Lapham’s Quarterly
Author: Douglas McLennan
The World Order Was Created For Nations. But Increasingly Cities Are Taking The Lead
No, Chicago isn’t about to negotiate with North Korea. And London isn’t making a mutual defense treaty with New York. But on a range of issues from climate change to workers’ rights, cities are making pacts with one another. – CityLab
Game Of Thrones Premiere Shatters Ratings With 17.4M Viewers; Most-Watched Scripted Show Of The Season
GoT is the extremely rare drama that has managed to grow its audience every single season (AMC’s Breaking Bad was another). AMC’s The Walking Deadused to top Game of Thrones in the ratings, but the zombie drama has recently fallen to around 5 million weekly viewers. – Entertainment Weekly
An Art Professor’s Painstakingly Detailed Scans And Images Of Notre Dame Could Help Rebuild It
In 2010, Andrew Tallon, an art professor at Vassar, took a Leica ScanStation C10 to Notre-Dame and, with the assistance of Columbia’s Paul Blaer, began to painstakingly scan every piece of the structure, inside and out. They mounted the Leica on a tripod, put up markers throughout the space, and set the machine to work. Over five days, they positioned the scanner again and again—50 times in all—to create an unmatched record of the reality of one of the world’s most awe-inspiring buildings, represented as a series of points in space. – The Atlantic
UK Survey: Forty Percent Of Those Who Drop Out Of The Arts Workforce Leave Because Of Family Obligations
The survey of over 2,000 current or former arts workers, carried out by Parents and Carers in Performing Arts (PiPA) and Birkbeck, University of London, found that 43% of respondents who had left the industry cited being a parent as the biggest factor behind their decision to leave. – Arts Professional
Is Fighting A Bad Idea? (Philosophically Speaking, Of Course)
The upside of winning is pleasure and glory, but the cost of always winning is never getting to know how much more was in you. The only way to find the limit is to cross it. But you can’t lose unless you fight your heart out. Which is why I say, more fighting, more biting. – The Point
Outdoor Piano Concert Attracts Bats. The Ravel Made Them Furious!
Boris Giltburg: “Those critters just wouldn’t budge. They seemed to appear on the keyboard out of nowhere and then stayed there, lethargically, utterly unresponsive to any shooing movement I managed to produce while playing. I had a choice: to close my eyes and constantly risk my fingers landing on one, or keep my eyes open and observe a mass of insects all moving ever so slightly on the keyboard.” – The Guardian
Over The Next 20 Years Trillions In Wealth Will Be Inherited. How Will This Change Philanthropy?
One report last year estimated that transfers to Gen-Xers and millennials over the next decade alone could yield more than $2o billion a year in new grants to nonprofits. – Inside Philanthropy
Why We Love Music? A Battle Between Order And Disorder
Human beings have a conflicted relationship to this order-disorder nexus. We are alternately attracted from one to the other. We admire principles and laws and order. We embrace reasons and causes. We seek predictability. Some of the time. On other occasions, we value spontaneity, unpredictability, novelty, unconstrained personal freedom.
The Improbable Story Of The Guy Who Bought A $1K Painting Over The Internet And Sold It As A Leonardo Worth $500M
Today, of course, the contents of Lot 664 are worth far more than that: The picture has since sold once for $127.5 million and again, in a record-setting auction at Christie’s, for close to half a billion dollars. It has been held up as the “male Mona Lisa” and the “Holy Grail of old-master paintings” and derided by this magazine’s art critic, Jerry Saltz, as a “two-dimensional ersatz dashboard Jesus.” – New York Magazine