“Today in good news, the United Nation’s latest World Happiness Report was released and it shows that happiness is on the rise in more countries than it’s falling. The increased happiness is driven by jolly Latin America and substantially rosier attitudes in Africa.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Ballet’s First Screen Star
“Ellen Price, the early-20th-century Danish ballerina, has two claims to immortality. Firstly as the model for Edvard Eriksen’s statue of The Little Mermaid, the tourist face of Copenhagen; and secondly as one of the very first ballerinas whose dancing has been preserved on film.”
Where The Hashtag, Pilcrow, And Ampersand Came From
Keith Houston, owner of the blog Shady Characters, recounts the origin stories of these odd punctuation marks – and explains how the hashtag got the name “pound sign”.
London Bookies Favor Haruki Murakami For Nobel Lit Prize
For now, Ladbrokes is offering 3-1 odds on the Japanese author. “Other favoured contenders include US author Joyce Carol Oates (6-1), Hungarian writer Peter Nádas (7-1), South Korean poet Ko Un (10-1), and Alice Munro, the short story writer from Canada (12-1).”
Sudden Surge In Nobel Literature Prospects For Ngugi wa Thiong’o
On Thursday, Ladbrokes temporarily suspended all betting on the Kenyan writer’s winning the prize. The company only does that when there’s a sudden large bet (or several), and there was one – from Sweden.
How Independent Was That New Financial Review of The Minnesota Orchestra?
Well, who paid the consultants? Who was the client? The MinnOrch board. Blogger and professional orchestra musician Robert Levine looks through the document – and the assumptions the analysts made.
The New York Times‘s 20 Directors To Watch
Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott discuss – and interview – an assortment of filmmakers aged 40 and under from four continents.
Egyptians Join (And Tweet) Together To Combat Looting
“Amid the bloodshed and chaos of the past three months, evidence is growing that ordinary Egyptians are banding together in an effort to secure archaeological sites, museums and monuments in the face of growing looting and deliberate targeting of the country’s heritage.”
Small U.S. Theaters Presenting Large, Multiple-Installment Epics
At the Public Theater in New York. Mike Daisey is doing 29 different monologues on consecutive nights. The Utah Shakespeare Festival is in the midst of a multi-year project to perform all ten of the history plays in chronological order. WNYC’s tiny Greene Space is hosting star-studded readings of all ten plays in August Wilson’s Century Cycle. How and why are these little companies doing such big projects?
Meet America’s Master Builder Of Historical Harpsichords
John Phillips and colleague Janine Johnson “build the instruments by hand. The sun-flooded central room of the workshop has some power tools, but planing the bottom of a case to the desired thickness is done by hand (it takes an hour). So is carving a bridge (that takes a day) or making the bird-quill plectra that pluck the strings.”