Russian investigators are probing a version of the alleged crime that both men were avid readers to pass the lonely hours in the Antarctic station. But Savitsky had become angered that Beloguzov ‘kept telling his colleague the endings of books before he read them’.
Author: Douglas McLennan
Breaking: Ex-Met Museum Director Tom Campbell To Be CEO Of Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
At a meeting of the FAMSF trustees Tuesday, the board is expected to appoint Thomas P. Campbell as director. In that role, Campbell will assume responsibility for leading two of the Bay Area’s most prominent visual arts institutions, the Legion of Honor and the de Young Museum.
A Trans Gender Literary Canon?
“I’m apprehensive about the limitations inherent in canonization, mainly canon’s inadequate literary representation of difference as tokenism, and the prohibitive inaccessibility for those who can’t afford education at the highest levels. So it’s not a canon exactly, but a corpus. It’s something more like a body: mutable, evolving, flexible, open, exposed, exposing. It’s the opposite of erasure; it’s an inscription.”
London “Borough Of Culture” To Get Its Own Dancers-In-Residence
London Mayor Sadiq Khan: “I am determined to ensure that all Londoners get the opportunity to experience our cultural riches regardless of their background or where they live, and to increase the level of participation in culture across London.”
New York’s Storefronts Are Disappearing. Can You Regulate A Fix?
Several studies indicate that 20 percent of Manhattan’s storefronts lie vacant—concentrated in the borough’s most trafficked areas, where commercial rents have soared. The worrisome trend—which exists outside of Manhattan, too—suggests a question: What happens when a city becomes too costly to offer the very ingredients that people look for in a city?
So “Reality TV”? Reality Movies Are A Whole Different Animal
These films serve as a testament to the growing trend of “street casting”—using “normal” people, discovered in their natural habitats, rather than those found through casting agencies or the professional acting community. Some of the best independent films of the past few years—Sean Baker’s “The Florida Project,” Andrea Arnold’s “American Honey,” and Abdellatif Kechiche’s “Blue Is the Warmest Color”—were created this way, and they make the notion of professional acting seem altogether antiquated, particularly when the characters are part of a milieu that requires a heightened degree of specificity. Stories about subculture succeed when handled delicately, and with the willing guidance of those within it.
Virtual Reality Promises To Give You Experiences Outside Your Experience. But Can It Cultivate Empathy?
VR researchers tell us that simulations can let us see what it’s like to experience the day-to-day indignities of racist microaggression, of becoming homeless, or even of being an animal primed for butchering. The hope is that this technologically-enabled empathy will help us to become better, kinder, more understanding people. But we should be skeptical of these claims. While VR might help us to cultivate sympathy, it fails to generate true empathy.
What The World Looks Like From A Non-Binary Perspective
“Despite a widespread assumption that everyone fits into neat gender categories, I’ve always been treated as a gender question mark. My social interactions since childhood have been filled with wildly vacillating gender expectations. These days, though, I identify as nonbinary not because I am androgynous. Rather, I do so because experiencing life as an androgynous person has made me acutely aware of how gendered expectations and assumptions saturate our lives.”
We’re Obsessed With Genealogy. But Our Genes Tell Us Mixed Messages
In a sense, we are all royals, even if we don’t all have royal DNA in our genomes. And yet, we are obsessed with genealogies. ‘By one estimate,’ Carl Zimmer writes, ‘genealogy has now become the second most popular search topic on the internet. It is outranked only by porn.’
MPAA: More Than Half Of All Movies In The Past 50 Years Have Been Rated “R”
The breakdown: Since 1968, the first year of the ratings classifications, there have been 17,202 movies rated R, 5,578 rated M/GP/PG, 4,913 rated PG-13 and 1,574 rated G. Just 524 movies have been rated X or NC-17, reflecting the reluctance of exhibitors to carry those titles.