“Charles Dickens thought Americans weren’t very funny. ‘They certainly are not a humorous people,’ he wrote in 1868, ‘and their temperament always impressed me as being of a dull and gloomy character.'” That was before burlesque and vaudeville …
Author: Matthew Westphal
Top Posts From AJBlogs 04.01.14
Up and Coming Meet the Masters
AJBlog: Dancebeat | Published 2014-04-01
Stepping Up: Judith Dolkart Leaves Barnes Foundation for Addison Gallery Directorship
AJBlog: CultureGrrl | Published 2014-04-01
The Roots of “Noah,” and More on San Diego
AJBlog: CultureCrash | Published 2014-04-01
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Why Are the Soldiers in Returning-Soldier Stories Never Women?
“They’ve deployed alongside men as soldiers in three wars, and since the 1990s, a significant number of them are training, fighting and returning from combat. But stories about female veterans are nearly absent from our culture. It’s not that their stories are poorly told. It’s that their stories are simply not told in our literature, film and popular culture.”
Why Should You Have To Believe God Exists In Order To Be Religious?
“Richard Feynman, the great physicist, is rumored to have said that he lived among the numbers, that he was intimate with them. However, he had no views about their metaphysical status … Just as a practicing mathematician need not have views about the metaphysical status of numbers, so too religious life does not require a theoretical stance on God’s existence.”
Do the English Stage ‘Hamlet’ Too Often?
Michael Dobson, director of the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon, and Observer theatre critic Clare Brennan argue it out.
Report Blasts Former American Academy President on Pay and Résumé
“The American Academy of Arts and Sciences issued a report on Monday condemning its former president, Leslie Cohen Berlowitz, for inflating her résumé and influencing the academy’s procedures in order to increase her pay far beyond that of leaders of similarly sized organizations.”
Yes, Book Editors Edit Books (They’re Not Just Business People)
HarperCollins editor Barry Harbaugh: “The editorial staffs of New York houses are not the faceless lemmings that a certain retail giant with a vested stake in self-publishing would have us be. And though it would appear to outsiders that the health of our careers depends solely on measurements of quantity (of the books that we acquire and the units sold), we’re not numbers-obsessed automatons. Editors edit. A lot.”
What Brooklyn Stands For In American Culture (My, How It’s Changed)
A.O. Scott remembers how, in his youth, the popular idea of the borough was what you saw in The Honeymooners, Saturday Night Fever, Welcome Back Kotter, and Spike Lee’s early films. Today it’s Portlandia-East, the scene of Girls – a change that Lee decries but arguably helped bring about.
Spike Lee Goes After A.O. Scott For Piece About Brooklyn
“Since you are a New York Times Film Critic this should be very easy for you. According to your logic I should not have Written and Directed JUNGLE FEVER because I have never lived in HARLEM and BENSONHURST. I should not have Directed CLOCKERS because I have never lived in Boerum Hill and the Gowanus Projects. I should have not Written and Directed HE GOT GAME because I have never lived in CONEY ISLAND.”
Humans Have 20 Different Ways to Make Faces
“For years, scientists studying facial expressions have focused their research on six primary emotions: happiness, surprise, anger, sadness, fear, and disgust.” But Ohio State University researchers “suspected that there’s more to the human condition than these six simplest states of being.”