Just last month, this memoir of the author’s journey to post-Qaddafi Libya in search of his father won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. Now it has received the £20,000 Rathbones Folio Prize – in the first year the honor has been open to both fiction and nonfiction.
Author: Matthew Westphal
Turkish Authorities Shut Down Magazine For Showing Anti-Erdoğan Graffiti In Background Of Photo
The municipality of metro Istanbul closed 1453 Culture and Art Magazine and fired three editors for “bounderish, disrespectful and provocative content” – that content being a spray-painted “Erdo-gone! Inshallah mashallah (God willing)” on a wall behind a cat. The offending article? A cover story on a popular documentary about the city’s street cats.
Top Posts From AJBlogs 05.24.17
Pillow Talk
I had planned this post before Trevor O’Donnell wrote this: Is Marketing about the Consumer or the Product? Really I had. … read more
AJBlog: Engaging Matters Published 2017-05-23
Claudia Quintet In Action
As pointed out in a Rifftides review earlier this year, drummer John Hollenbeck’s Claudia Quintet … has unity of thought, purpose and execution more often found in long-lived classical ensembles than in jazz. … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2017-05-24
‘One Hundred Years Of Solitude’ Was Not An Instant Classic
“Fifty years after the book’s publication, it may be tempting to believe its success was as inevitable as the fate of the Buendía family at the story’s center.” It wasn’t – it had many detractors in its first years, including some who dismissed it as traditionalist and anachronistic.
Aaron Copland, The Sound Of Americana, And Sen. Joe McCarthy
In this “United States of Anxiety” podcast, Sara Fishko talks with composer John Corigliano about how Copland developed a popular style that came to represent Americana in the popular mind and even got tied up with politics – and what happened to that style (and Copland) when the age of the Red Scare arrived.
Wendy Whelan Remembers The First Time She Danced Balanchine – It Was The Day He Died
“I went silent with shock [on hearing the news]. I have never been the type of person to burst into tears or visibly show my emotions, and my immediate thought was that I didn’t have the right to feel emotional about this. I had just arrived on the scene and had no real history with the man, or his work for that matter.”
Why The ‘Conceptual Penis’ Hoax Is Pretty Much A Flop
Philosopher Peter Boghossian and mathematician James Lindsay clearly hoped that their fake gender-studies paper, “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct,” would go down in history as an Alan Sokal-style triumph. Phil Torres explains why their hoax proves a lot less than they’d like to think it does (and proves one thing they’d probably rather it didn’t).
Ex-Mayor Bloomberg Gives $75 Million To New ‘Culture Shed’ On Manhattan’s High Line
“His gift, through his charitable organization Bloomberg Philanthropies, helps solidify what promises to be New York’s first new cultural institution in recent memory, to be completed in spring 2019, that will present performances, concerts, visual art, music and other events. With Mr. Bloomberg’s donation, $421 million will have been raised toward a $500 million capital campaign that includes start-up costs.”
The Hero Librarians Of North Philadelphia
Columnist Mike Newall: “I visited the century-old library that sits atop Needle Park in Kensington because I’d heard its staff was the first in the city to learn how to administer the lifesaving overdose antidote Narcan.”
A Protest Ballet By Cole Porter (?!) Gets A Revival
“The production, called Within the Quota, criticized restrictive immigration laws that had been passed by Congress [in the 1920s]. … Now, to protest President Trump’s anti-immigrant stance, the Princeton University Ballet is reviving the production.” (includes audio)