Author: Douglas McLennan

Fosse And de Mille – An Odd Turn Of Legacy

Why does de Mille’s choreography seem so dated now, while Fosse’s still looks as fresh and provocative as ever? It’s particularly puzzling considering that de Mille was the more revolutionary of the two. She created a startling new approach to integrating dance into the musical via character development, and established the standard for the widely imitated (and later much-parodied) “dream ballet,” an expressionistic choreographic sequence probing deep into characters’ psyches. Fosse’s great contribution to Broadway dance, on the other hand, is largely limited to his creation of a compelling physical vocabulary,

Can Art Get Us To Understand And Care About Climate Change?

“There’s no evolutionary reason for us to be able to comprehend the scale of [climate change]. The museum has to create space for strong feelings and recognize that [those feelings] are a primary pathway into climate engagement. We saw that with [Weil’s] exhibition. Visitors described themselves as feeling emotions including awe and an intense sense of responsibility.”

Why Are European Leaders Suddenly Quoting Dostoyevsky?

French President Emmanuel Macron cited Dostoyevsky’s speech about Pushkin—in which the writer makes a dramatic appeal for Russian universalism—in a press conference with Vladimir Putin in Saint Petersburg on May 24. Then, on Tuesday, the prime minister of Italy’s new populist government, Giuseppe Conte, paraphrased—or perhaps mis-paraphrased—the same Dostoyevsky speech in his first address before the Italian Senate.

The Toxic Problem Of Super Fandom

To be a member of a fandom is to take a property and embrace it like a vise. You consume it, you talk about it with fellow fans, maybe you go to conventions, maybe you write fanfic or draw fanart, and no matter what — and this is the most crucial part — you pray that, if there’s more of it, it’ll be as good as the best of what’s come before. There are polite fans who say it quietly and don’t get mad when their needs aren’t met. But, by their very nature, such fans are always going to be drowned out by the ones who, like Bobby Axelrod, declare to the world, These are my needs. What’s remarkable and dangerous is the fact that, in the past 20 years, Hollywood started feeding them. They started getting what they wanted, and they’ve never looked back.

What If Our First Encounter With Alien Life Was With Artificial Intelligence?

Encountering an alien AI would not only point to our own possible future, but also prompt a curious shift in our worldview. When Nicolaus Copernicus proposed in the 1500s that the Earth was not central in any way to the Universe, he set in motion the development of a critical scientific idea: that there is nothing cosmically special or significant about us. But meeting an ET-AI could turn that realisation on its head: if the only intelligence we meet is machine in nature, then we would be special, after all.

In An Increasingly Extremist World, A Pitch For Extreme Moderation

“Wherever you look, whatever you do, performance has gone extreme, often policed by a tracking app or a competitive peer (sometimes masquerading as a friend). Moderation, in any form, is seen as nothing but amateurism, the habit of a slacker who won’t commit 10,000 hours of practice to master something. I long ago decided to invest in extreme moderation.”