“Apparently Rio de Janeiro is not satisfied with being chosen as the site of the 2016 Summer Olympics and the host of the championship game of next year’s World Cup of soccer. Now Brazil’s most effervescent city also wants Woody Allen to make a movie there.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
The Rise Of The Jazzbro (And The Danger He Poses To Jazz)
“The jazzbro is ‘utterly convinced of both the superiority of his taste and the marginalization of his ideas.’ … Unlike the hipster, [the] jazzbro doesn’t feel alienated from society or life, except aesthetically.”
TMI! Why Some People Overshare On Facebook
“There’s apparently something alluring about filling those empty white boxes with embarrassing anecdotes – anecdotes that BuzzFeed then compiles and publishes in list form for everyone else to laugh at. … What compels us to tell the world with our fingers what we’d hesitate to utter in a room full of loved ones?” Naturally, social scientists have some ideas about why.
Minnesota Orchestra Musicians Accept Proposal From Mediator; Management Balks
“Former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell made a proposal to soften the potential downside for musicians to engage in bargaining, according to the musicians’ negotiating committee. Musicians agreed to the terms but management declined, according to a confidential letter that the musicians’ team sent to board members Wednesday.”
Jasper Johns’s Longtime Assistant Charged With Stealing And Selling Johns’s Art
James Meyer, 51, “was arrested for stealing at least 22 works from his employer and selling them through an unnamed New York gallery for $6.5 million, falsely telling the dealer and buyers that Mr. Johns had given them to him as presents.”
In Defense Of Movie Violence
Robbie Collin: “Film is the only art form that can attack us on that stomach-twisting level, and perhaps that is why we often hear that the medium has a violence problem. Don’t buy it for a second. For ‘problem with’, read ‘knack for’: the reason there is so much violence on film is that film is perfectly suited to addressing it.”
Did Neuroscientists Just Locate Near-Death Experiences In The Brain?
“Proving the existence of the afterlife is, of course, beyond the scope of science. But something physical might be able to explain the phenomena of near death experiences, according to a new finding by a team of neuroscientists from the University of Michigan. They observed, at least in the brains of rats, a sudden surge of electrical activity that continues for roughly 30 seconds after clinical death.”
How Did Mikhail Bulgakov Deal With Official Soviet Disfavor?
He asked repeatedly to be deported, even writing letters to Stalin himself. “The manoeuvre was impossible to fault. Since hundreds of officially sponsored reviews of ‘work had stated that he had no place in the Soviet Union and that he would ‘never change’, he would agree.”
Artist Ed Ruscha, Having Quit L.A. MOCA’s Board, Joins SFMoMA’s
“A year after Ed Ruscha joined three other prominent Los Angeles artists in resigning from the Museum of Contemporary Art’s board of trustees, he has signed on to the board of another major California arts institution – the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.”
Self-Published Novel Wins $25,000 PEN Award
Public defender and first-time novelist Sergio de la Pava published A Naked Singularity himself after repeated rejections from publishing houses. “The book slowly generated buzz on blogs before being picked up by the University of Chicago Press, a distinguished publisher not known for its contemporary fiction. Writing for Slate, Paul Ford called it ‘the sort of book you write if you’re not sure anyone will ever let you write another one’.”