Author: Matthew Westphal

Why Did Mendelssohn Never Write An Opera?

His music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream seems so promising. Yet “spend any time in the company of Mendelssohn’s letters, and it becomes clear that here is a man of prodigious talent, shining intellect and bubbling enthusiasm who, when it came to opera, pretty much pressed self-destruct on any project that was suggested to him.”

Playing Rosalind: Two Actors (One Female, One Male) Explain How They Did It

Michelle Terry (currently playing Rosalind at Shakespeare’s Globe): “Going into the forest of Arden, disguised as a man, means she gets to explore every possible version of herself.” Ronald Pickup (played Rosalind in Olivier’s all-male production at the Old Vic in 1967): “I was watching a rehearsal in the Old Vic when John Dexter … leaned over and said: ‘Get a fucking pair of legs. You’re going to play Rosalind in a year’s time.'”

Why ‘The Act Of Killing’ Director Made A Second Documentary – With A Survivor Of The Mass Murders Confronting The Murderers

Joshua Oppenheimer (The Look of Silence): “Imagine you have to go to weddings and funerals and socialize politely with people who murdered your children because you’re too afraid to actually speak out and confront them. That takes a tremendous toll on our humanity.” (video interview and film clip)

There’s No Such Thing As A Psychopath

“Unlike discrete psychological disorders such as schizophrenia or depression, psychopathy is a disorder sustained by rhetoric rather than by science – ‘psychopath’ is just a strong word for a deviant, in the same way that ‘jerk’ describes someone you don’t like but reveals little about that person’s psychology.”

The Key To Rereading A Text (Metaphorical Pun Alert!)

Philosopher and psychologist Riccardo Manzotti suggests that “our brain is like a lock maker that makes a lock whenever a key is deemed interesting enough. But when a key – for example, a new poem, or a new species of animal – is first met, there is no lock yet ready for such a key. … The next time we meet or perceive the object/key it will open the lock prepared for it in the brain.” Tim Parks unpacks the simile.

How The World’s Most Popular Tarot Deck Was Designed (In 1909) And Came To Market (In 1970)

No, the set of cards most of us know doesn’t come from the Middle Ages. It’s “is a product of the intuitive thoughtfulness of an American-born occult scholar in late 19th century London, a British-born creative visual genius who studied art in New York City and lived in Jamaica, and a businessman whose first book was about coal mining techniques … These three people, essentially, are the only reason any of us know much of anything about tarot.”