“The darkest shade of black isn’t a pigment at all – it’s a material called Vantablack that’s made up of billions of carbon nanotubes clustered together, and it reflects so little light that were you to spread it over a piece of wrinkled tinfoil, the wrinkles would disappear.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Ángel Corella, Lovin’ It At Pennsylvania Ballet
“Mr. Corella, 40, seems to be having a very good time these days as he works to reinvent the Pennsylvania Ballet, where he has made top-to-bottom changes since becoming artistic director in 2014. He has brought on new artistic staff, new administrative leadership, new dancers from all over the world and a new approach to programming.”
National Book Critics Circle Awards: Ta-Nehisi Coates And Lauren Groff Suffer Upsets
“Some thought Ta-Nehisi Coates would take home another prize for Between the World and Me, his memoir and meditation on race in America … “Lauren Groff’s novel Fates and Furies, about the secrets of a marriage, also seemed like a front-runner in the fiction prize.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 03.17.16
The Weight of Failure
Gravity is greater on Planet Freelance than on Planet Employee, and failure is heavier for a freelancer than for a company employee. During 20 years of employment in organizations and … read more
AJBlog: Field Notes Published 2016-03-17
The Importance of Play
Failure and success tend to go hand in hand. One can’t experience one without the other. Failure is how we learn, how we grow, how we change, and ultimately, how … read more
AJBlog: Field Notes Published 2016-03-17
The dominant problem
Most of us would admit that our work comprises a complex bundle of interconnected problems. Each day we attack the particular problems in front of us (or the problems that pop up or pop into … read more
AJBlog: The Artful Manager Published 2016-03-17
Teaching controversial topics in class, and guns
At the Chronicle of Higher Education, Erik Gilbert writes that academics should calm down about college campuses being moved by legislation to allow the concealed carry of firearms. He concludes: People who are terrified by … read more
AJBlog: For What It’s Worth Published 2016-03-17
Buoyant about Met Breuer: My Q&A with Metropolitan Museum President Daniel Weiss – Part II
The last of the Metropolitan Museum’s “Five-Year Strategic Goals,” listed in the Mission Statement of its latest annual report, is to “to enable greater transparency, efficiency, collaboration and communication” … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2016-03-17
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‘Dead Mammals Have Never Been So Mesmerizing’: A Badger Made Into A Theremin
“If you never in your lifetime imagined that you’d see a man in a bowtie and tailcoat playing Rachmaninov on a badger, well, now you have. You’re welcome.” (video)
Yo-Yo Ma – Music Happens Between The Notes
Krista Tippett: “In his art, Yo-Yo Ma resists fixed boundaries. He’d like to rename classical music just ‘music’ – born in improvisation, and traversing territory as vast and fluid as the world we inhabit. In this generous and intimate conversation, he shares his philosophy of curiosity about life, and of performance as hospitality.” (audio plus transcript)
Martin Charnin Is Still Directing ‘Annie’, Four Decades After Its Premiere
“The fun of it for me is that every time I do it, I learn something new about it, and in theory every production that precedes the one I’m doing makes the one I’m doing the beneficiary of the stuff that I’ve learned. So it keeps growing, it keeps changing.” (includes memories of being in the original West Side Story)
‘She Was Less Like A Recluse, More Like A Bomb Going Off’ – The Real Emily Dickinson
“She was promiscuous in her own fashion, deceiving everyone around her with the sly masks she wore. She was faithful to no one but her dog. Her white dress was one more bit of camouflage, to safeguard the witchery of her craft. … Cotton Mather would have burned her for a witch.”
Poet Released From Prison After Royal Pardon
“A Qatari poet jailed for 15 years for reciting verses that praised the 2011 uprising in Tunisia and criticised his own country’s ruling family has been freed after receiving a royal pardon.” Muhammad Ibn al-Dheeb al-Ajami’s release “came days before Qatar hosts two international press freedom conferences.”
Should We Be Afraid Of Intelligent Computers?
Yes, the defeat of a world-champion Go player by Google’s DeepMind computer was impressive, as was Watson’s triumph over Ken Jennings at Jeopardy!. Yet we’re still far from anything like HAL.