“Officials at the Centre Pompidou have confirmed that … more than 20 exhibitions drawn from the holdings of the Beaubourg Gallery will be shown in the new outpost, called Le Centre Pompidou Shanghai (West Bund), which is based in a wing of the new 25,000 sq. m West Bund Art Museum designed by the UK architect David Chipperfield.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Remember The ‘Who’s Who’ Directories Of Notable People? (They Really Did Matter Once)
“So what’s the deal? Where did this seemingly dumb idea come from and why does it persist? Today’s Tedium points out why it was once valuable, and why it no longer is.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 07.19.17
The World Is Your Classroom (Or Gym)
Naomi Even-Aberle introduces us to her community: her gym. She shares how impactful it can be to take part in the successes, failures, and challenges of her students and peers as well as … read more
AJBlog: Field Notes Published 2017-07-19
Part of Something Bigger
Jaclyn Roessel reflects on the first time she felt like a part of a community, when she was 12 years old and had her Kinaaldá ceremony, in which she became a woman and felt the kinship of not only her nuclear family, … read more
AJBlog: Field Notes Published 2017-07-19
Recent Listening In Brief: Mitchell, Zeitlin, Cole
Roscoe Mitchell, Bells For The South Side (ECM)
If you have followed Mitchell’s searching music over the past 50 years, Bells For The South Side will reassure you that the septuagenarian composer, … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2017-07-19
Dolly Parton Is Sending Free Books To Hundreds Of Thousands Of Pre-School Children Every Month
The goal of the Dollywood Foundation’s Imagination Library project is to send one free book a month to every child under 5 who wants one. “Five percent of the U.S. population younger than 5 years old receives a book through the program. The goal is to reach 10 percent by 2024.”
What the Research Really Suggests About That Facebook Chatbot Therapist
Woebot (that’s what it’s called) “seems intriguing. The idea is to help you understand and monitor your moods using a combination of natural language processing and therapeutic expertise. Sounds good, right? Using A.I. via social media to significantly reduce psychological problems like anxiety and depression would be quite a breakthrough. But there are some major hurdles to overcome.”
The 100 Greatest Props In Movie History, And The Stories Behind Them
“While iconic movie props make us laugh, gasp, scream, and/or sit in absolute silence, they rarely start iconic; as a property master will tell you, the best on-screen objects go unnoticed, silently winning you over with truth. Well, call us obsessives, but we couldn’t help but notice. At a time in history when details go painfully overlooked, we slid movie history under a microscope to honor the simple joy of a perfect prop.”
Sherman Alexie Ends Book Tour For His Memoir Due To Depression (And His Mother’s Ghost)
“I don’t believe in the afterlife as a reality, but I believe in the afterlife as metaphor, and my mother, from the afterlife, is metaphorically kicking my ass. … I have been sobbing many times a day during this book tour. I have sobbed in private and I have sobbed onstage.” (One commenter called it “the most poetic cancelling of a book tour in history.”)
Scandalous ‘Exposés’ About Nuns Were Antebellum America’s Most Popular Books
“The ‘convent exposé’ [was] a book, fictional or not, that purported to reveal the sin and salaciousness hidden behind the walls of religious institutions. In these books, sisters are kept captive, denied medical care, and sometimes raped or otherwise subject to sexual depravities. … These books, mostly forgotten today, were some of the most popular publications of their time.” (One was outsold onely by Uncle Tom’s Cabin.)
Abusive Speech Really Can Damage Students (So It’s Good To Keep Milo Yiannopoulos Off Campuses)
Psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett does make a distinction between speech that’s abusive and bullying (Milo) and speech that’s merely offensive (Charles Murray): “The former is a danger to a civil society (and to our health); the latter is the lifeblood of democracy. By all means, we should have open conversations and vigorous debate about controversial or offensive topics. But we must also halt speech that bullies and torments. From the perspective of our brain cells, the latter is literally a form of violence.”
If We Keep Telling Students That Wholly Free Speech Will Traumatize Them, They’ll Probably Feel Traumatized (So Stop It)
Jesse Singal: “There’s an intriguing area of behavioral science known as mind-set research, and one of its tenets is that the relationship between stress and humans’ response to it is partially mediated by how people expect stress to affect them. … If you tell students over and over and over that certain variants of free speech – variants which are ugly, but which are aired every moment of every day on talk radio – are traumatizing them, it really could do harm. And there’s no reason to go down this road, because there’s no evidence that the mere presence of a conservative speaker on campus is harming students in some deep psychological or physiological way.”