That civilization’s main cities “boasted street planning and house drainage worthy of the twentieth century. They hosted the world’s first known toilets, along with complex stone weights, elaborately drilled gemstone necklaces and exquisitely carved seal stones featuring one of the world’s stubbornly undeciphered scripts. … Now – as a result of increased collaboration between archaeologists, linguists and experts in the digital humanities – it looks possible that the Indus script may yield some of its secrets.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Handwritten Draft Of King James Bible Discovered
“The King James Bible may well be the greatest work of literature ever written by committee – and now we know a bit more about the collaboration that produced it.”
Stop Expecting Artists To Work For Free – Or Worse, For ‘Exposure’
“The debate over working for free goes back a while now. But there are still people who haven’t heard the argument and think that ‘exposure’ of creative work is reason enough for people to give away their labors.”
Using Arts Education To Create Good Citizens And Thinkers: Remembering Black Mountain College
“Democracy is about making choices, and people need to take ownership of their choices. We don’t want to vote the way someone else tells us to. We want to vote based on beliefs we have chosen for ourselves. Making art is making choices. Art-making is practice democracy. Rice did not think of art-making as therapy or self-expression. He thought of it as mental training.”
What If You Made A Great Movie And Nobody Came? Why ‘Steve Jobs’ Bombed
“Danny Boyle and Aaron Sorkin’s exhilarating biopic-but-not-a-biopic of the late Apple co-founder sank like a stone in its first week of wide release after promising numbers in major markets and mostly rapturous reviews (ours included). What happened? The Internet, being the Internet, has some theories.”
Oldest College Dance Program In US May Stop Offering An Undergrad Major
“While the dance minor and graduate program will remain, the school has proposed dissolving the dance major under budget constraints. … Founded in 1938, Mills’ dance department is the oldest, continuously-run program in the country today. With that comes a list of distinguished alumni, including Molissa Fenley and Trisha Brown.”
The Illusion Of Deliciousness: How Packaging Can Make Food (Seem) More Flavorful
“Sitting in a pub one night a dozen years ago, Charles Spence realized that he was in the presence of the ideal experimental model: the Pringles potato chip.” The Oxford experimental psychologist argues “that in most cases at least half of our experience of food and drink is determined by the forgotten flavor senses of vision, sound, and touch.”
Picasso’s Last Surviving Lover/Muse And Marcelo Gomes Make A Ballet Together
Françoise Gilot, an accomplished painter herself and still active at age 93, has created the backdrop for Gomes’s new AfterEffect, the first work he has choreographed for his colleagues at American Ballet Theater.
It Don’t Come Easy: David Lynch’s Relationship With Language
“Affable despite his elusiveness, Lynch seems [in an early interview] less to be stonewalling than striving to verbalize daunting concepts with a vocabulary that might politely be termed basic. … It’s clear from the 1979 footage – and from almost every interview he has done since – that words do not come easily to him. … Lynch has said, more than once, that he had to ‘learn to talk,’ and his very particular, somewhat limited vocabulary seems in many ways an outgrowth of his aesthetic.”
Maria Callas Still Sets The Opera Diva Standard, Even After Half A Century
Peter G. Davis argues that La Divina changed both the way we listen to opera and the ambitions and goals of countless later singers.