“It’s one of those challenges you wonder how you ever came to accept: go to the Edinburgh festival and take part in as many plays and other events as possible. … Preparation for my Edinburgh extravaganza? A few calls to writers, directors, producers, publicists, anyone, just before I take the sleeper north, asking them if they had any parts for a large, greying man with a wooden stage presence. I’ll be honest: I do not sleep well on the train.”
Author: Laura Collins Hughes
Research: Contact With Nature Linked To Selflessness
“A series of studies suggests immersion in nature ‘brings individuals closer to others, whereas human-made environments orient goals toward more selfish or self-interested ends,’ according to a paper posted on the Web site of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. This appears to be the first research to examine the impact of the natural world on people’s values and aspirations, and its findings have intriguing implications for architects, designers and urban planners.”
Downloading Music Is The Greener Path, Study Says
“The study, which was financed by both Microsoft and Intel and written by two academics at Carnegie Mellon University and a third affiliated with Stanford University, found that buying an album digitally reduces carbon dioxide emissions by 40 to 80 percent relative to a best-case scenario for purchasing a CD.”
In A Rut? It May Be Because Stress Has Rewired Your Brain.
“Reporting earlier this summer in the journal Science, Nuno Sousa of the Life and Health Sciences Research Institute at the University of Minho in Portugal and his colleagues described experiments in which chronically stressed rats lost their elastic rat cunning and instead fell back on familiar routines and rote responses…. Moreover, the rats’ behavioral perturbations were reflected by a pair of complementary changes in their underlying neural circuitry.”
LACMA Director Gets Almost $1M Per Year, But Should He?
“In good times, eyebrows might be raised over whether $1 million a year is a fair wage for a director of a nonprofit museum. But in the midst of a recession that has forced budget cuts and layoffs at museums around the country, the issue becomes more loaded.” Michael Govan’s “compensation, about a 50% increase over that of his predecessor, places him in an elite group of art museum directors who for the most part preside over institutions more prestigious and many times richer than LACMA.”
The Public Loves Redbox. Studios Had Better Love it, Too.
“By trying to keep their product from Redbox for as long as possible, the studios are doing what all businesses do when threatened by dramatic change — they’re trying to hang on to their business model for as long as possible. But after you get past all the legal mumbo jumbo, it’s impossible to ignore the obvious: The DVD market is undergoing a seismic shift where many of the same people who once wanted to buy every DVD in sight are now far more eager to rent movies, and rent them cheaply at that.”
The Care And Feeding Of Herb And Dorothy’s Artworks
“After-hours at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin,” a scene unfolds “that has already taken or soon will be taking place at 49 other museums, one in each state: the opening of a gift of 50 works of art sent by Herb and Dorothy Vogel. … Unlike some donors, the Vogels imposed only two minimal conditions to their gift: that the entire gift be exhibited together once within five years, and that it be deaccessioned only as a whole.”
Suicide As A Strategy For Escape
“Should we regard suicide — under the right circumstances — as the logical end of the Good Life? The question is raised by the death of the distinguished British conductor Sir Edward Downes, 85, and his wife Joan, 74,” whose children framed their deaths “as the culmination of the couple’s fruitful years together.” Michael Chabon, considering David Foster Wallace’s suicide, says that while “suicide is an idea alien to my way of thinking … [t]he world, like our heads, was meant to be escaped from.”
Baseball Bets Big On Berlin Ballet Stars’ Genes, Discipline
“Max Kepler-Rozycki, 16, has just received an $800,000 bonus to sign with the Minnesota Twins, a stunning sum for a teenager out of Europe and a record for an amateur position player outside the U.S. and Latin America. … But the reason the Twins are betting long on a kid who is still two years away from his high school graduation is another pair of attributes scouts talk about, both inherited from his parents, former Berlin ballet stars.”
Met Sets A Record With First-Day Sales
“The Metropolitan Opera is trumpeting record first-day sales for its upcoming season, with the Met box office taking in $2.5 million for the 2009-10 season.”