“Imagine being so disgusted by denim, for example, that running a hand over jeans makes you want to puke. Or feeling the urge to laugh whenever you touch silk. Or getting the creeps whenever you put on a fabric glove. That’s life for people with tactile-emotional synesthesia, a mysterious condition in which seemingly arbitrary textures can be enough to make someone laugh or cry.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
The First Rape On The Ballet Stage
“Ballet sex wasn’t invented by the choreo¬grapher Kenneth MacMillan – Mikhail Fokine, Roland Petit and Frederick Ashton had all included episodes of startling sensuality in their work – but The Invitation, with its frank depiction of rape, broke new and dangerous ground when the Royal Ballet’s touring company premiered it in 1960.”
Why People Gossip
“The origins of gossip can be traced at multiple levels: evolutionary, cultural and developmental. While some forms of gossip are almost certainly negative or superfluous, others seem to serve a beneficial social role: Gossip can help solidify personal relationships and encourage cooperation. And if a new research finding is right, children engage in this form of gossip by age 5.”
The Lumière Brothers Didn’t Just Invent Moving Pictures, They Were Film Artists
“The Lumières were responsible not just for a successful invention but a huge number of films, which experimented with techniques that were necessarily new and roamed across a rapidly changing landscape, from their factory in Lyon and across Europe to America and east Asia.”
George Frideric Handel, Financial Guru
“Handel’s investing career took a perhaps familiar course: after an initial, highly risky foray into the stock market, he decided to stick to safer assets that paid a steady income. In fact the shares he chose to buy in the early days were in the notorious South Sea Company, which ruined many investors, including Sir Isaac Newton.” (Handel, as it happens, got out in time.)
Restoring One Of The World’s Oldest Libraries
The Qarawiyyin Library in the Moroccan city of Fez is well over a thousand years old, and it’s about to reopen after a four-year renovation. “There were problems of infiltration, of sewage, degradation of walls, some cracks in different places in the library.” (includes audio)
Sicily And Naples Blow €150 Million In EU Grants For Restoring Heritage Sites
“The southern Italian regions of Sicily, Calabria and Campania have failed to spend hundreds of millions of euros in European Union (EU) culture and tourism funding,” which Brussels has now taken back.
Broadway Has Yet Another Record-Breaking Season
“Hamilton brought a boost. The Lion King provided ballast. … Broadway seems to be defying the cultural odds: An ancient art form in the digital age, it is strengthening thanks to an ever-increasing influx of tourists and a resurgent enthusiasm for musical theater.”
Outgoing Fresno Philharmonic Music Director Says He Wanted To Stay On
Theodore Kuchar: “Fifteen [years] is a large number, but, hey, I wanted to stay in Fresno … [CEO Stephen Wilson] wants me out of town as quickly as possible so people forget.” Says Wilson, “It is fair to say that the relationship between music director and exec director in professional symphony orchestras is a complex one. … For an organization to be successful, it absolutely has to be a partnership.”
2016 Obie Awards To ‘Guards At The Taj’, ‘The Humans’, ‘Eclipsed’
Rajiv Joseph’s Guards at the Taj was honored as best new play, Stephen Karam (The Humans) and Lucas Hnath (The Christians and Red Speedo) won awards for playwriting, and the ensemble cast of Eclipsed took one of several acting prizes.