“Sitting outside, Khouri and Baki tried to make sense of the racket. ‘Every time the door opened, we could hear the General Security guys yelling at Hatem while he tried to explain to them what a comic book was,’ Baki said.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Eighty Years of Penguin Books – By The Numbers
“Before Allen Lane began his publishing house in 1935, good books were the purview of the privileged, costing more than many Londoners spent on a week’s rent. But that all changed when Lane, then managing director of the now-defunct Bodley Head, bought the rights to 10 already popular hardcovers … redesigning each with a uniform set of specs so simple that even small, inexperienced print shops could mass-produce them on the cheap.” (infographic)
Christopher Jackson, 67, Montreal’s Godfather Of Early Music
“For generations of Montrealers, the pure tone and clear expression he cultivated with the Studio de musique ancienne de Montréal, an ensemble he co-founded in 1974, defined the way Palestrina, Victoria, Lasso, Tallis and other Renaissance masters should sound.”
LA Philharmonic Takes Its Virtual Reality Machine To The Streets Of LA County
“The Los Angeles Philharmonic has launched a virtual reality project in which people don VR goggles and Samsung headsets that give them a 3-D, 360-degree experience of four minutes of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5, performed by the orchestra at Walt Disney Concert Hall. The VR goggles and other equipment were put aboard a bus, dubbed Van Beethoven, and sent out to tour the county through October.”
Is The Internet Doing To TV What It Did To Newspapers And The Music Business? Maybe Not
“Despite sharing the vulnerabilities of other long-standing media – shrinking audiences, changing consumption patterns, new competition for ad dollars – the television dinosaur has only grown fatter.”
What American TV Tells Us About Our Jobs
“One might expect TV to say about work what The Office says: that what you are obliged to do all day is pointless. … Although associated with the freedom to mute, surf, and binge-watch, TV pays attention not only to what we do when we’re on the clock, it also asks philosophical questions about work and the meaning of life, urging us to demand more meaning (whatever that might be) from what we do for a living.”
Notes Toward A Theory Of Hair: Siri Hustvedt Reflects On The Cultural Meaning Of Coiffure
“All mammals have hair. … We are the only mammals who braid, knot, powder, pile up, oil, spray, tease, perm, color, curl, straighten, augment, shave off, and clip our hair.” Not to mention using it as a signifier of gender, religion, and/or cultural politics.
Walter Benjamin’s Legacy, 75 Years On
“For devotees of Critical Theory, he is now seen as one of the founding fathers … having helpfully transcended mere wittering about paintings, books and Mickey Mouse by also sketching a philosophy of history. … And, almost as a hobby, he is the inspirational linkman between the 19th-century flâneur and today’s psychogeographers.”
Sara Mearns Of New York City Ballet On Being ‘In The Prime Of Her Career’ (She’s 29)
“A ballerina’s career is so short and it’s kind of hard for me to think that these are going to be the best years of my career and after that it’s just going to suck. You know? I don’t want to think about it like that.”
How Origami Is Informing Structural Engineering
“A sheet of paper can bend, twist, and tear easily. But folded several times, it becomes stiff and can support objects many times its weight. That’s the basic idea behind ‘origami engineering,’ an emerging technique in structural engineering that’s based on a centuries-old Japanese art form.”