“I reach up and shakily remove the Samsung Gear VR headset. As though emerging from a vivid nightmare, I am abruptly back in Manhattan, blinking against the bright summer light streaming into an airy third-floor apartment, where I’m seated on the edge of a chaise lounge. “
Author: Matthew Westphal
National Book Award Winners 2015: Ta-Nehisi Coates Extends His Winning Streak, Adam Johnson Pulls An Upset
Coates adds the nonfiction award for Between the World and Me to the Kirkus Prize he won last month and the MacArthur “genius” Fellowship he received in September. Johnson’s short story collection Fortune Smiles edged out the presumed frontrunners, Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life and Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies. (includes full list of winners and nominees)
The Talented, Thorny, Hard-Working, Mean-Spirited, Bigoted, Brilliant Patricia Highsmith
The author of Strangers on a Train, The Price of Salt (republished as Carol), The Talented Mr. Ripley, and 19 other novels, “Highsmith is almost impossible to shoehorn into any category – political, literary, or psychological. … “
28 People On The Lesbian-Culture Artifacts That Changed Their Lives
Alison Bechdel, Christine Vachon, Lea DeLaria, Carrie Brownstein, and others name books, movies, songs, paintings, photographs, and underwear ads (yes) that made all the difference.
Verbing Nouns And Nouning Adjectives And Adjectiving Verbs: The English Language’s Fountain Of Awesome Is –
– antimeria, “a rhetorical device that repurposes a word as a different part of speech than usual. In exposing that word’s ability to be understood across grammatical categories, antimeria … does more than surprise or joke or streamline (or sow surprise or crack a joke or render prose more streamlined). Antimeria unlocks a word’s essence. Thing is, a lot of people hate antimeria.”
Artificial Intelligence: Can We Figure Out What To Do With It Before It Figures Out What To Do With Us?
“If artificial intelligence can be achieved it would be an event of unparalleled consequence – perhaps even a rupture in the fabric of history. A bit of long-range forethought might be a moral obligation to our own species.”
Making Better Babies: The Dream Of Designing Human Beings, From Plato To Nobel-Laureate Sperm Banks To Gene Editing
“For centuries, human hereditary improvement was a problem in social, not biological, engineering: how to persuade or coerce people into marrying to benefit the population as a whole. The obvious analogy was to agriculture and animal husbandry.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 11.18.15
Another Rough Night: Sotheby’s Underperforming Sale of Alfred Taubman’s American Art
With a total of $13.04 million (including the buyer’s premium), the auction at Sotheby’s tonight of 31 works from A. Alfred Taubman’s American art collection (eight of which failed to sell) will be of little help in reducing the formidable $95-million gap … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2015-11-18
Lookback: the death of a president
From 2003: I was a small-town second-grader on November 22, 1963. My teacher, Jackie Grant, told the class that the president had been shot and killed, and then we all went home. For me, home was a block away from the classroom door, but my mother still drove to the school to pick me up, … read more
AJBlog: About Last Night Published 2015-11-17
Snapshot: Martha Argerich plays Liszt
Martha Argerich plays Liszt’s Sixth Hungarian Rhapsody on TV in 1966. … read more
AJBlog: About Last Night Published 2015-11-18
[ssba_hide]
Playwrights’ Rights And White Tears: On Race-Specific Casting
“Last week, Clarion University in Pennsylvania was forced to cancel its planned production of Lloyd Suh’s Jesus in India. The reason: casting. Three of the characters were written as Indians, and the predominantly white school had cast two white actors and one mixed-race actor in the roles. Earlier the same week, Katori Hall objected passionately in The Root to a Kent State University production in Ohio of her two-hander The Mountaintop, in which the role of Martin Luther King Jr. was played by a white actor.” Diep Tran looks at why the issue isn’t as simple as let-the-best-actor-get-the-role.
Twyla Tharp On Performing In The Wake Of Atrocity
“Ultimately we go on with no mention of this obscene parallel reality abroad. But our pre-curtain announcement, ‘Turn off cellphones as a courtesy to your fellow audience members,’ seems poignant to me as I think about courtesy, as I think about gatherings, and as I realize that performance cannot take place without the right to assemble.”