“Our current built environment squanders too much fresh water and other vital resources, and tips too many poisonous substances into our surroundings. To develop a more sustainable relationship with the natural world, we need to allow chemical exchanges that take place within our living spaces, and between the inside and the outside. We need to embrace permeability.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
The Revolution That Flash Photography Created
“Flash brings a form of democracy to the material world. Many details take on unplanned prominence, as we see in the work of those Farm Security Administration photographers who used flash in the 1930s and laid bare the reality of poverty during the Depression.”
Should Theatre Reflect Audience Or Create It?
“Populism aims to represent the people. That can function on two levels: reflecting it on the one hand and creating it on the other. With the former, we assume that the people exist before a representation of them is made. With the latter, we want to make it exist. This second concept is performative; we understand that it is close to the performance. The link with theatre and the other performing arts depends perhaps on how we should understand what an audience is.”
Why Spoken English Is So Different From Written English
“Modern languages with a long literary tradition show a stark split between their written and spoken styles across many contexts. In current English, writing uses more varied vocabulary than conversational speech, and it uses rarer and longer words much more often. Certain structures (such as passive sentences, prepositional phrases, and relative clauses) appear more often in written than spoken language. Writers generally elaborate their ideas more explicitly through syntax whereas speakers leave more material implicit. And written language stacks clauses inside each other to a greater depth than spoken language. This is one of the most striking differences between speech and text; sentences like the opening line of the Declaration of Independence simply do not occur in conversation.”
A Warning About The Imprisonment Of The French Language
Facing the “aberration” of gender-inclusive styles, the French language is henceforth in “mortal peril.” (Yes, it says that.) Adaptations such as écrivaine for female writer, or la ministre for a female minister, will end in a “disunified language, disparate in its expression, creating a confusion that verges on illegibility.” The new spellings and syntactical signs will burden teachers and complicate reading. The dream of a coherent francophonie – the international community of French speakers – will be annihilated by the additional spellings and complexity “to the benefit of other languages that will profit from this confusion to prevail around the world.”
How Our Attempts At Crowdfunding Failed Big Time (And Taught Us How To Think Better)
Well, it was hard – possibly worse than anyone had advised.
Former Met Museum Director Ignites Leonardo Controversy With Instagram Post
Below the image of the Leonardo da Vinci, Campbell, who left the Met at the end of June, wrote the caption “450 million dollars?! Hope the buyer understands conservation issues…” followed by “#readthesmallprint”.
English And The Imprecision Of Languages
“English and German have common origins, Anglo-Saxon, or Old English. There’s a lot of overlap, but there are also some crucial differences. English is a left-leaning language, meaning that relevant information tends to be clustered on the left side of a sentence. German, on the other hand, is a right-leaning language. (We are a generally a right-leaning people.) As a result, German sentences can surprise you with an unexpected verb or participle at the end of a sentence.”
DC’s New Bible Museum Has Lessons For Other Museums
Philip Kennicott: “Every resource of museum design and careful argumentation has been mustered to sweep up these unrelated ideas in one, big, overwhelming package. This has implications for people in the museum business. The Bible Museum has come to town, in all its technical splendor, bearing with it something that most historians and museum professionals may have thought was long discredited: the “master narrative” idea of history, that there is one sweeping human story that needs to be told, a story that is still unfolding and carrying us along with it.”
Indianapolis Theatre Plans Reinvention With A New Building
The Phoenix Theatre: “Once you build a big machine and have to keep feeding it, then you’ve made a decision that’s going to impact every area of the organizations, not the least of which is the artistic. But we never want to be so beholden to chasing dollars that that becomes our major pursuit… At the end of the day, the business operation is there to enable the art.”