“Nadella, whose own first book, the memoir/vision for the future Hit Refresh, is being published in late September, says that he’s drawn particular inspiration from these seven works on history, economics, technology, and management strategy.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
Movie Musicals Came Into Their Own In The 1950s. But Fred Astaire Was On The Outside Looking In
Astaire’s fate in the early fifties was something one suspects he’d never accounted for: his age was beginning to show. Of course, this was a time when elderly men still courted young women on-screen with stunning regularity, and had Astaire been a normal romantic lead, this might not have been a problem. But he was a dancer.
What Can We Learn From The Progress Of Civilization?
“The news here is that the lives of most of our progenitors were better than we think. We’re flattering ourselves by believing that their existence was so grim and that our modern, civilized one is, by comparison, so great. Still, we are where we are, and we live the way we live, and it’s possible to wonder whether any of this illuminating knowledge about our hunter-gatherer ancestors can be useful to us.”
Cincinnati Enquirer Lays Off Last Of Its Arts Critics
Classical music writer Janelle Gelfand was the last of the Enquirer’s arts writers to go. At its peak, the Enquirer had a theater, art, movie, food, classical, pop, and books critics, each with their own beats. The move comes only weeks before the city’s Music Hall was to reopen after a major makeover. Gelfand was leading coverage of the reopening.
Indomitable Pioneering Artist John Killacky Announces Retirement From Vermont’s Flynn Center
The Flynn’s statement cited Killacky’s emphasis on access and inclusion, as the arts center now works with 75 social-service agencies to provide discounted tickets for their clients. The organization provides $30,000 in scholarships toward participation in the Flynn’s classes and camps. Killacky also led a three-year, $2.3-million renovation campaign for the Flynn that received contributions from 274 sources.
One Thing Futurists Don’t Challenge In Projecting The Future (And Maybe They Should?)
No matter how radical these predictions are, they tend to take the long-term durability of capitalism utterly for granted: Responding to decades of stagnating wages and sliding labor force participation, the Institute for the Future’s report “10 Strategies for a Workable Future” (which is in many ways quite sharp and informative) acknowledges deep problems with our current labor ecosystem and digs into important issues of benefits, collective bargaining, and education. But it doesn’t even consider the idea that the challenges it identifies are inherent to a system whose primary objective and value is capital accumulation, not equity and the common good.
Words, Words, Words. We All Use Them. So We’re All Experts In Poetry
In his new book, “Why Poetry,”Matthew Zapruder makes the bold assertion that understanding poetry requires “forgetting many incorrect things we have learned in school” and accepting “what is right before us on the page.” Any reader can do that, he says, because “we are all experts in words; we have been for a long time. And any word we don’t know we can look up.”
Whitney Museum Has Plans For A Major Hudson River Project
David Hammons’s Gansevoort installation is expected to feature a ghostlike image of the original Pier 52 building on that site, according to those who have been briefed on the project — an open minimalist framework of what had originally been there, like a pencil line drawing in space. The project would rest on 12 pilings — five of them on the peninsula, with a sixth out at the end of it and another six in the water to the south.
Judge Rules Seuss-Derived Play Doesn’t Violate Copyright
The dispute began in 2016, when Mr. Lombardo, a playwright, was preparing to stage “Who’s Holiday!” — a 75-minute, one-woman play that features Cindy Lou Who, the adorable girl from the book who teaches the greedy Grinch the true meaning of Christmas. In Mr. Lombardo’s version, Cindy Lou Who is all grown up. She is now a hard-drinking, prescription-drug-abusing middle-aged woman who lives in a trailer park and served time in prison for killing her husband, the Grinch.
V&A And Royal Opera House Team Up For Exhibition Tracing Intersections Of Cities And Opera
“What we were looking for were moments when you could see the intersection between the opera and the city, and a thread that went right around Europe. We weren’t looking at the whole history of opera. We started from the time it became a public entertainment.”