“Nowhere has this glacial pace of government administration been more keenly exhibited than in the authorities’ clumsy efforts to reboot the museum. From frequent delays in kick-starting construction, to the events immediately following the attack, the restoration has become mired in confusion, red tape, and allegations of corruption.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
How Lesbian Was Sappho, Really?
There’s an awful lot of hearsay (many centuries’ worth), much of it conflicting, and just about no direct evidence. Even the surviving poems themselves aren’t clear: were they personal outpourings of passion or lyrics meant for public performance by a chorus? Daniel Mendelsohn looks at the facts we have.
Juilliard’s Drama Director Steps Down From Theater He Founded And Ran For 25 Years
“James Houghton, the founding artistic director of Off Broadway’s Signature Theater, will step down from the organization after a 25-year tenure that has seen the organization’s expansion into a busy theater producer with a $66 million, multi-venue outpost in midtown Manhattan. Houghton, recently diagnosed with stomach cancer, will continue to teach at Juilliard, where he’s the director of the drama division.”
Shakespeare’s Globe Gets Seven-Day Strike Warning
“Shakespeare’s Globe has been given seven days to avert strike action following a dispute over tour guides’ pay at the venue. Backstage union BECTU has been calling for a pay increase” for guides from £11.24 to £15.16 by November and £18.50 over the following two years.
Mario Vargas Llosa And His Peru
“His books ignore none of Peru’s clashing, kaleidoscopic elements, but his vision, sometimes explicit and more often artistically indirect, is at bottom a gentlemanly, non-millenarian one … Humans, to him, are just another type of ‘fauna,’ a word that Vargas Llosa went on to use in novel after novel, not with detachment or revulsion but, rather, with a sort of zookeeper’s tenderness for his charges.”
Artist Gets Her First Gallery Show At Age 100
“Ever thought you were too old to take on a fresh challenge, learn something new, or add a few more chapters to your memoir? Please allow me to introduce Frieda Lefeber.”
Nietzsche And Climate-Change Denial
Andrew O’Hehir: “The philosopher gave himself credit for being the first modern thinker to tackle ‘the problem of science itself,’ for presenting ‘science for the first time as problematic and questionable.’ Dude! If the perverse German genius could only have known how far ‘the problem of science’ would extend in our age, or to what ends his critique of Socratic reason would be twisted.”
17 Things We Know About Forgiveness
First of all, “The scientific literature on forgiveness only dates back to 1989, amazingly.”
“Abandon Literary Dignity” And Write Two Versions Of Your Novel, Says Fay Weldon – Artsy For Printed Books And Quick-N-Dirty For E-Readers
“Writers have to write now for a world where readers are busy, on the move and have little time for contemplation and reflection. The writer has to focus on writing better, cutting to the chase and doing more of the readers’ contemplative work for them.”
Applying Fay Weldon’s Advice: E-Reader Versions Of Famously Difficult Literary Classics
“With Weldon’s words in mind, we decided to bowdlerize some famously difficult blocks of text” – from Joyce, Faulkner, Proust, James, and Woolf – “to get them ready for the busy Kindle reader, in order to examine exactly how new system this might work.”