“Belief without doubt would not be required by an all-loving God, and it should not be worn as a badge of honor. … Anyone who does not occasionally worry that he may be a fraud almost certainly is. Nor does the worry absolve one from the charge; one may still be a fraud, just one who rightly worries about it on occasion. Likewise, anyone who does not occasionally worry that she is wrong about the existence or nonexistence of God most likely has a fraudulent belief.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
‘Blue Velvet’ At 30 – Still Shocking After All These Years
Dennis Lim: ” The shock of the new fades by definition, but if it has hardly done so in the case of Blue Velvet, that may be because its tone remains forever elusive. To peruse the early reviews is to sense the emergence of the slipperiest of sensibilities, one that no one quite knew how to talk about. To encounter or revisit the film now, decades later, is to realize that we still don’t.”
China Resorts To Tax Break To Get Its Cinemas To Show Chinese Films
“Last week, state regulators announced that Chinese theater chains that generate at least two-thirds of their box office receipts from local Chinese films will be able to keep half of a five percent tax they usually pay on ticket sales.”
William Randolph Hearst Really Did Try To Ruin Orson Welles
“Previously unpublished documents have revealed the scale of a plot by the media mogul William Randolph Hearst to discredit Orson Welles and destroy Citizen Kane, the 1941 film about the rise and fall of the fictional newspaper proprietor Charles Foster Kane.”
Gary Shteyngart Remembers A Surprise Trip With His Hero, Garry Shandling
“And then I looked at the empty seat next to me and it dawned on me. My seatmate for the next six hours was going to be the man whose hair style I had tried to copy through most of high school, with much hair mousse and little success. The man I wanted to be if I ever grew up, because he made people laugh while he told them the truth, which, back in the late eighties and early nineties, was still a novelty.”
Can Broadway Musicals Get Brave?
Despite Hamilton and Fun Home, “the season to come – with its promised jukebox musicals, revivals, and adaptations of television shows and films – suggests that most producers are still playing it safe. … Why has [the genre] been so slow to change? And what can writers, directors and producers do to productively shake up the form?” Alexis Soloski sees some hope.
Bosch’s Hometown Gets In The Spirit For His 500th Anniversary
“The Dutch city of ‘s-Hertogenbosch is as unlike Hell as a place could be. … But this month, in honor of the five hundredth anniversary of his death, a major exhibition at the Noordbrabants Museum and several citywide celebrations of Bosch’s work have studded the innocuous landscape of his home town with tributes to the infernal bacchanals he depicted.”
The Best Part Of Easter? Satan And The Harrowing Of Hell
Molly McArdle explains how medieval images of the Devil, and of the time between the Cruicifixion and the Resurrection, helped her finally make sense of the Catholic faith in which she’d grown up.
‘Conductrix’ – It’s Like ‘Guitar Hero’ For An Entire Orchestra
Co-creator Eimear Noone: “I thought, what if you could create a virtual experience where people could experience what I feel and see on the podium, the high I get when the main theme from Zelda kicks in?”
Parrots Got Rhythm – And So Do Elephants, Sea Lions, Bonobos And Other Critters
Studies of Snowball the dancing cockatoo (who had a round of television fame in the late ’00s) “turned out to be just the prelude to a new concerto of research on musicality in the animal kingdom. In recent years, scientists have tested various species and found evidence that nonvocal learners such as sea lions and bonobos have rhythm too. In parallel, pioneering studies have begun to elucidate how the brain tracks a beat.”