“[The] novelist, travel writer, essayist, and biographer … the 50th anniversary of whose death rolled around this year, celebrated by those survivors who had the misfortune of knowing him at all well, was as wretched and ornery a human being as anyone could be who was not actually moved to suicide or murder.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Does Empathy Lead Us To Moral Actions Or Get In The Way Of Them? (A Debate)
Research psychologist Paul Bloom, author of the new book Against Empathy, and a colleague from Stanford, Jamil Zaki, argue it out.
The Oakland ‘Ghost Ship’ Fire And The Contradictions Of The ‘Creative City’
“We can read into this tragedy the disastrous head-on collision of two conflicting obligations that the ‘creative city’ imposes on itself and its residents.”
‘They Came After Me With The Fury Of Wasps’: The Woman Who Pretended To Be JT LeRoy Defends Herself
The young demimonde celebrity of the ’00s had a hell of a backstory, which turns out to have been made up by a middle-aged “fat Jewish girl” from Brooklyn. (Her sister-in-law made the public appearances in a red wig.)
Indie Booksellers Pick Their Favorite Overlooked Books Of 2016
There’s a huge French bestseller just translated into English, a ferocious and hilarious satire of contemporary El Salvador, Jim Harrison’s final collection of poetry, the history of a New York apartment building through the AIDS crisis, a history of the coyote, and “the most literary book on bodybuilding and superbike racing you’ll ever read!” (There’s also Marina Abramović’s memoir, which we don’t think was exactly overlooked.)
Rereading ‘Great Expectations’ After 50 Years
David Denby: “Page by page, the book is less hearty than I remembered … and much funnier – really savage in many passages.”
Could Wood – Glued-Together Layered Slabs Of It – Become The Next High-Tech Building Material?
“Sandwiching layers of wood and adhesive,yields cross-laminated timber (CLT), a kind of super-plywood that comes in immense slabs as long as a bowling lane and as thick as 12 inches. A similar process yields steel-hard beams called glulam. The principle is almost touchingly simple: ‘Gluing a stack of cards together produces something stronger than building a house of cards.'” And you can build skyscrapers with it.
Race Mixing, Resistance, Resilience: The History Of ‘Othello’ In America
The Adams family (specifically, Abigail and John Quincy), like many of their day, saw the play as a tale of the dangers of race-mixing; white 19th-century Americans de-blacked the title role; Paul Robeson saw it as an indictment of white racism (and claimed the role for black actors ever afterward). “For more than 200 years, Americans have fought over Othello’s race as a way of fighting over the meanings of race itself.”
Gay Plays In 2016 – We’ve Come A Long Way From ‘The Boys In The Band’
“Portraits of gay life in mainstream culture are no longer rare; they have been proliferating for decades. As a result, no one play (or movie) bears the burden of either seeming to affirm, or attempting to negate, stereotype.” Charles Isherwood looks at five shows presented in New York this year.
Paris Opera Ballet Booted From Its Own House’s Next Production
Choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker is directing the staging of Mozart’s Così fan tutte opening at the Palais Garnier late next month, and her central idea is to have a dancer doubling each of the opera’s six characters. The singing roles are double-cast, and the plan was to use six dancers from de Keersmaeker’s own company with one cast and six members of the Paris Opera Ballet (who had been rehearsing with the choreographer for several weeks in Belgium) with the other. According to a statement from the Paris Opera, de Keersmaeker has decided that, with two sets of singers involved, for practical as well as artistic reasons she wanted to set her extremely detailed direction on only one group of dancers – her own, who have been working on the choreography for more than a year. (in French; Google Translate version here)