“He came to national attention as president of the University of Pennsylvania, which he led from 1981 until 1993, when President Bill Clinton selected him for the [National Endowment for the Humanities] post. … Dr. Hackney said he aimed to cultivate a ‘national conversation’ on American identity and steadfastly defended the government’s role in promoting the humanities.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Man Booker Prize Expands Eligibility To Writers Worldwide
“At present, the £50,000 ($79,850) prize only considers works by writers from the Commonwealth, Ireland or Zimbabwe. … Announcing the changes in London on Wednesday, the Booker Foundation said: ‘The expanded prize will recognise, celebrate and embrace authors writing in English, whether from Chicago, Sheffield or Shanghai.'”
Eli Broad Won’t Be L.A. MOCA’s Lead Funder For Much Longer
“Eli Broad said Tuesday that he won’t continue giving $3 million a year to his new museum’s across-the-street neighbor, the Museum of Contemporary Art, ending his five-year run as its primary funder.”
Melbourne Arts Centre Faces Big Deficits, Staff Layoffs
“According to the restructure proposal, nearly every business unit within the Arts Centre could face losses: performing arts (including programming), corporate services (finance and human resources), customer enterprises (commercial and visitor/reception services), marketing and online, as well as development (corporate communications).”
Canada Is Becoming A Cinema Powerhouse (Thanks To Smart Government Funding)
“In sharp contrast to the way of working in the United States, Canada has a filmmaking process that assigns a prominent role to national government agencies, which identify and nurture promising talent through official programs, vet film proposals, and help finance the making and distribution of those projects deemed to be the most interesting artistically.”
Inside Assad’s Presidential Palace
“You can learn a lot about a dictator from their domestic decor. Saddam Hussein had a thing for gold loos and erotic fantasy murals. … Colonel Gaddafi, meanwhile, preferred the simple life. He opted to live in a luxury Bedouin-style tent … So what about monster of the moment, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad? We know he’s a bit of a tech geek …”
Why Are The Grimms’ Fairy Tales So Violent?
“The Brothers saw themselves as faithful recorders of a living German tradition. They wanted to preserve these stories in their true and exact form. … The violence of the folktales is part of their power. The Brothers Grimm understood this fact. They wanted to tap into that power. They thought that the tales would revitalize a German people fallen on hard times.”
Why We Can’t Have A Grand, Unified Theory Of Life, The Universe And Everything
“Thinkers in the grip of the Newtonian picture of science want a general basis for general phenomena. Life isn’t like that. Unity fails at both ends. To understand the fundamental processes that go on in living things – mitosis, meiosis, inheritance, development, respiration, digestion and many, many more – you need a vast ensemble of models, differing on a large number of details.”
There Is A Grand Unified Theory Of Pixar
Jon Negroni: “The Grand Unified Theory of Pixar is a long tale, spanning centuries, of a struggle for the domination of Earth among humans, animals with humanlike consciousness, and sentient inanimate objects – AI machines.”
Why Does The Internet Run On Cat Videos And Not Dog Videos?
On the Media investigates, and finds that the reason is a strange and unusual combination of ancient cultural archetypes, modern tech culture, changing gender roles and, well …