From anger to surprise to happiness to depression to disgust, “across cultures, people feel increased activity in different parts of the body as their mental state changes.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
A Dozen Maps That Changed The World
From Ptolemy to Korea ca. 1400 to Mercator to Google Earth.
Italy’s Entire Opera System Nears Collapse
“Only three Italian opera houses are currently able to pay their bills within two months.”
Vasari’s Last Supper Reassembled After Nearly Half A Century
“The last casualty of the devastating Florence flood of 1966 has been reassembled, raising hopes of a full restoration before the 50th anniversary of one of the greatest cultural disasters of modern times.”
London Theatre Cave-In: Why The Audience Didn’t Panic
Social psychologist Chris Cocking looks at the impressively orderly response of the people in the Apollo Theatre when the ceiling collapsed – and sees more evidence of what his profession calls “social attachment theory”.
No Excuses – Fix The West End’s Theatres!
Lyn Gardner: “It was once said that it would be impossible to modernise football grounds but that has happened, in some cases through updating and in some instances through re-building. Like football, West End theatre is a business, and one that last year posted record revenues.”
The Year’s Most Pirated TV Show
Fans “are so eager for the murder, villainy, depravity and wedding banquets gone horribly wrong depicted on that series that they don’t mind engaging in a little piracy to see the show.”
We’re In A Golden Age Of Video Games – And Video Game Criticism
Well, the New York Times video game critic would say that, wouldn’t he? But Chris Suellentrop may have a point.
Saving the Lost Art of Conversation
“In a fast-paced digital age, an MIT psychologist tries to slow us down” – with the help of the age-old technique of eavesdropping.
Nicole Kidman With The Real-Life Character She’s Just Played
In The Railway Man, the Oscar-winning actress portrays the wife of Eric Lomax, who wrote a best-selling memoir of his time as a prisoner-of-war in a World War II Japanese labor camp in Thailand. In a three-way phone interview, Kidman and Lomax talk about getting to know each other and what they have in common.