Three years ago, on Chicago’s North Shore, an old movie theatre was in danger of being turned into a furniture store. “To prevent that from happening, and to try to bring some cutting-edge culture to the picturesque suburb, a few North Shore dreamers pooled their resources and dramatically reinvented the place” as a cultural center. It’s working.
Author: Laura Collins Hughes
Let Your Mind Wander. It Might Be Good For You.
“[W]hat if we’re wrong about daydreaming? What if it’s crucial to solving problems in our personal lives and at work? Brain scientists are beginning to suspect that it is. And if they’re right, we might need to rethink the way we work — perhaps even develop tools that actually encourage mental drift.”
Richard Rogers Displays His Humanist Side
The West London cancer center for which Richard Rogers won his second Stirling Prize Saturday night “shows Rogers’s critics, such as the Prince of Wales, that his architecture, at its best, can do human-scaled and even vaguely traditional, that it’s about more than just machines and modernism.”
FTC To Book Bloggers: Relax. We’re Not After You.
“The Federal Trade Commission, which set the blogging world aflame two weeks ago with new guidelines governing truth-in-cyberspace-advertising, ‘never intended to patrol the blogosphere,’ said Mary Engle, an FTC lawyer who addressed KidlitCon 09, a conference of kids’ book bloggers….”
Feminist Artist Nancy Spero Dies At 83
“Ms. Spero, who always viewed art as inseparable from life, developed a distinctive kind of political work. Polemical but symbolic, it combined drawing and painting as well as craft-based techniques like collage and printmaking seldom associated with traditional Western notions of high art and mastery.”
History, Ruined, Caroline Among Jeff Award Winners
“Nick Bowling’s TimeLine Theatre production of ‘The History Boys’ passed the examinations of the Joseph Jefferson Awards Committee and emerged triumphant at Monday night’s ceremony at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts. It won five Jeffs, including for best midsized play.”
Land Of The Lost Called Out For Depictions Of Smoking
Universal Pictures, which foisted the movie on the world, “did catch a break, however.” A volunteer public-health group’s threat “that the studio found to be the biggest smoking offender would be publicly shamed on nearby billboards” was foiled when “billboard vendors throughout Los Angeles … refused to run the ad.”
Mark Morris Names The Greatest Threat To Dance
“Dance itself. The one reason people don’t take dance seriously is because a lot of choreographers don’t take dance seriously. Audiences don’t want to see the kind of self-indulgent, boring dance that is so prevalent today.”
In Athens, Acropolis Museum Awaits Marbles’ Return
“For decades, the main argument against the return of the sculptures — known as the Elgin or Parthenon Marbles — was Greece’s lack of a suitable location for their display. The new Acropolis Museum is a stunning rebuttal.” To highlight what’s missing, the museum intersperses “plaster casts of the sculptures housed in London … with original pieces.”
Musicians’ Hearing Outperforms Regular People’s
Several recent studies have “found that serious musicians are better than other people at perceiving and remembering sounds. But it’s not because they have better ears.” It’s because of their training and how that training changes their brains.