Author: Douglas McLennan

LA Times Restaurant Critic’s Fabulous April 1 Takedown Of NY Restaurants

In Los Angeles, we’re spoiled by the breadth and quality of our dining options. In addition to outstanding year-round produce, I can get great huaraches, refreshing mul naengmyeon and impeccable chả giò within 15 minutes of where I live. But what about New York, a largely culturally bereft island that sits curiously between the Hudson and East Rivers at the foot of the Catskill Mountains? Sure, we’ve all heard of hotdogs, a staple of every New Yorker’s diet, famously gnawed on by rodent and human alike in that “toddling town.” – Los Angeles Times

In Search Of “Normal” (It’s Become A Festering Battleground)

“Normality” took a battering in the second half of the 20th century. Lots of people were angry about it and did their level best either to tear it down or render it definitively gauche. Who wanted to be normal? Normies were dull. Hammering the normies and transgression for the sake of transgression became a thing and is still a thing. Except, as Irish commentator Angela Nagle observes, it’s become an end in itself, at once “negative, nasty, and nihilistic”. Now it lives online in festering cesspools frequented by people who have no idea (and whose absence of ideas is not their fault) but who need rules and want normality. – Standpoint

Study: Canadian Artists Make Less Than Average Workers – Way Less

The median individual income of Canada’s artists is $23,100, or 45 per cent less than all Canadian workers ($41,900). A typical artist has employment income of just $15,000, a figure that is 59 per cent lower than the median of all workers ($36,700). That’s from a workforce of almost 800,000 people in Canada who work in cultural industries, which would also include librarians and archivists, graphic designers, editors and architects. – Toronto Star

Can Computational Science Really Improve Our Insight Into The Humanities?

Questions that historians and literary critics used to debate are increasingly scooped up by quantitative disciplines. In 2011, for instance, a team led by evolutionary biologists cooperated with Google to analyze millions of digitized books, published a study in Science, and announced that they had founded a new field called “culturomics.” – Chronicle of Higher Education

Ingmar Bergman Grew Weary Of Making Movies. Then He Started Writing Books

The books are startlingly intimate, exploring things he felt he couldn’t convey in film. “In order to go back to the beginning, to explore with such startling intimacy the archetype of all those other women, this great artist has to find a new mode of expression—one that was, so to speak, neither wife nor mistress. A virgin medium.” – New York Review of Books

Is Donald Trump Really A Great Novelist?

Richard North Patterson: “The aim of the novelist is to enlist others in his fantasies, immersing them in an alternative reality so emotionally compelling that they willingly suspend disbelief. Trump has dangerously conflated this sort of storytelling with real-life presidential leadership, casting himself in the role of the archetypal savior-hero, battling the forces of evil. He’s our first novelist in chief.” – The Atlantic

Charges Of Mismanagement Of Control Of Balanchine’s Ballets

Unlike a painting or the written score of a symphony, a dance is uniquely fragile because there is no foolproof way to preserve it and steps are easily forgotten. Even a complete work can be changed in subtle ways so that its vivacity is flattened. The petition raises a thorny question: Who is truly in charge of this peerless treasury of artworks for the next decades?  – Washington Post