A recent study conducted by the organization revealed something fascinating: A single academic paper, published by three Australian researchers in 2007, has been cited by Wikipedia editors over 2.8 million times—the next most popular work only shows up a little more than 21,000. And the researchers behind it didn’t have a clue.
Author: Douglas McLennan
Hacking The Museum: Museum Experiences For Those Who Don’t Like Museums
Maybe its strategies and events at first sound disconnected from traditional museum reverence, but they can bring in people who never would have guessed how much they might enjoy the museum context. Says Nick Gray: “I don’t think anybody before Museum Hack has said, ‘We’re going to really intentionally go after people who think that they don’t like museums.’ ”
Misty Copeland On The Mainstreaming Of Ballet
“It’s incredible that people are looking at dancers’ bodies as healthy, because that hasn’t always been the case. It’s been associated with us having eating disorders or being too thin, not being strong. For us to be in this moment and have [people] want to have a strong, lean, feminine body — I think it’s amazing. I hope going to these barre classes will introduce people to ballet in a way that they’ll want to step into an actual barre class.”
How Neuroscience Is Struggling To Understand Feelings In The Brain
“The question is not ‘Where is happiness in the brain?’ That’s like asking ‘Where is the perception of the sound of a dog barking in the brain?’ The better question is ‘How does the brain support happiness? What networks and processes are used to give rise to it?’ ”
Why It’s Important To Have Critics Of Color
“When an important work is met with thoughtful, engaged criticism, it gains depth and traction. And when each potent piece of writing reverberates as never before — shared, liked, and debated on social media — the critic has new opportunities to shape our increasingly toxic cultural discourse. For communities that have been historically shut out of that process, that power is pivotal. It’s the difference between being spoken about and being the authority on your own experience.”
Rise Of The Fake Museum
Call it the Kusama effect. Since Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Room exhibition has taken off (the recent Los Angeles opening of her show at The Broad sold out their 50,000 tickets in less than two hours), it has fueled a debate around selfie-friendly art. Although Kusama’s artworks were not necessarily made for the smartphone (many were made in the 1960s), it’s still part of the “made-for-Instagram” exhibits, or “selfie factories”.
Motion Picture Academy Expels Cosby And Polanski
In a statement, the Academy announced that the governing board had voted to remove the two disgraced stars “in accordance with the organization’s standards of conduct”. The board continued “to encourage ethical standards that require members to uphold the Academy’s values of respect for human dignity”.
How Riccardo Chailly Is Remaking La Scala
Italy is supposed to be a serious country these days, burying buffoonery and hedonism among the Coliseum ruins. Even Silvio Berlusconi is seen as an archaeological relic, not to be disturbed. So Riccardo Chailly’s embrace of opera buffa in his first full season as music director provokes the kind of disquiet that we might feel if Covent Garden reinstated Gilbert and Sullivan.
Margaret Atwood: How I Came To Write “Handmaid’s Tale”
“Stories about the future always have a what if premise, and The Handmaid’s Tale has several. For instance: if you wanted to seize power in the United States, abolish liberal democracy, and set up a dictatorship, how would you go about it? What would be your cover story? It would not resemble any form of communism or socialism: those would be too unpopular. It might use the name of democracy as an excuse for abolishing liberal democracy: that’s not out of the question, though I didn’t consider it possible in 1985.”
What Makes A Great Translation? 10 Translators Weigh In
It’s easy to say what a bad translation is. The ones that are accidentally jagged like the person wielding the scissors was drunk. The ones where someone has misunderstood the original, or perhaps misinterpreted it. The ones where all individuality has been smoothed out. But how do we identify a successful translation? When have we done our job well? What is it we want to achieve, beyond mere fluidity?