“The real danger … is that a show or podcast can become so persuasive that audiences think they’re getting the entire story – the objective truth – behind a murder and the ensuing trials. ‘It’s wrong to think of any of these shows as being unmediated texts.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Defending A Performance That Needs No Defense: Tina Fey As Sarah Palin (Take That, Malcolm Gladwell!)
While questioning the effectiveness of political satire on his Revisionist History podcast, Gladwell called Fey’s portrayal “toothless.” Well, that’s not how we remember it, and it’s not what political science researchers have been finding.
Church Altarpiece Designed By Thomas Hardy (Yes, The Novelist) Discovered With Flashlight
“Thomas Hardy is best known for his grand tragedies, but the chance discovery with an iPhone torch of an altarpiece believed to have been designed by the writer for a Windsor church reads like the start of a crime caper.”
Nobel Prize Winner Svetlana Alexievich On How She Learned To Listen
“My parents were both village teachers. The village was full of women. And they had to work very hard during the day, there were no men left in the village, and after they were done with work – the village was full of benches – they would all come outside and they would talk. It was scary to listen to them, but it was also very interesting. They talked about war about death about loss, because some lost their husbands recently and this was much more exciting and much more interesting than reading the books that we had in the house.”
Mastermind Of Destruction Of Timbuktu’s Medieval Shrines Pleads Guilty At The Hague
“Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi is the first Islamist militant to stand trial at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. He’s also the first person to ever plead guilty at the court. And the charges against him at the ICC are also a first: cultural destruction tied to his actions, and those of his rebels, at the historic city of Timbuktu.”
Detroit’s Legendary Heidelberg Project Is Coming Down
“After 30 years, the iconic Heidelberg Project – [Tyree] Guyton’s internationally acclaimed outdoor wonderland of wit and whimsy, painted abandoned homes and repurposed urban debris on Detroit’s east side – is being dismantled. … No, Guyton is not abandoning his life’s work or waving a white flag in the face of 12 arson-fueled fires that have destroyed six houses since 2013.”
Here Are The 2016 Gramophone Award Winners
“We are pleased to announce to winning recordings in each of the 12 categories of the 2016 Gramophone Classical Music Awards. … The winners of the Recording of the Year, Artist of the Year, Young Artist of the Year, Lifetime Achievement and Label of the Year will be announced at the Gramophone Awards ceremony in London on September 15.”
The ‘Sweeney Todd’-In-A-Pie-Shop Production Is Coming To The States
“The production, from the Tooting Arts Club, originated in 2014 at Harrington’s Pie and Mash Shop in London, where audience members sat at tables … and [later] transferred to a cocktail lounge in the West End.” In New York, they’ll be using an actual Off-Broadway theater, though they’ll reproduce a pie shop inside.
Soprano Daniela Dessì Dies Suddenly At Age 59
Fred Plotkin: “How could she sing in such a wide range of styles, from Mozart to bel canto (she sang Norma, Maria Stuarda and rare Rossini) to Verdi, Puccini and the verismo composers? She liked to say, ‘you sing using technique and your brain and the voice responds.'”
Another Dancer Joins The Pennsylvania Ballet Exodus
“‘It was a very easy decision,’ [Andrew] Daly said, surprising even himself, as he’d expected to dance for another 10 years. ‘I knew that if I stayed another year that I would’ve been emotionally completely destroyed.'”