“They are rarely interviewed. Few people outside theatre, film and TV know who they are. Yet casting directors rank among the most influential operators in show business. … So who are they, and what do they do?”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Torvill And Dean’s Ice-Dancing TV Competition To End
“Dancing on Ice mentors Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean have revealed that the ITV series would end in early 2014″ as the Olympic champions prepare to retire.
Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories
“‘The best predictor of belief in a conspiracy theory is belief in other conspiracy theories,’ says [researcher] Viren Swami … Psychologists say that’s because a conspiracy theory isn’t so much a response to a single event as it is an expression of an overarching worldview.”
How John Adams Knows When An Audience Is ‘Engaged And Intelligent’
“I talked to them after the show, at the CD signing. But you can also tell by the ambient noise in the room during the performance, the coughing. I’m highly attuned to that sort of thing.”
The World’s Largest Youth Arts Festival Is Beginning – But Did Anyone Tell The Target Audience?
The Come Out Festival, which opens this week, has been taking place in Adelaide, Australia for four decades. But when Shona Benson asked around the city, she got fond-but-vague memories from adults and blank stares from teenagers (who showed interest once she filled them in, and obvious tie-ins in the national media have been going unmade. What gives?
What College Is Really For: Pleasure
“Overall, college education seems a matter of mastering a complex body of knowledge for a very short time only to rather soon forget everything except a few disjointed elements.” So what’s the point of higher education? Pleasure, says Gary Gutting. (Yes, that’s the word he uses.)
Here Comes Honey Boo Boo Is ‘Exactly The Kind Of Cultural Product America Should Be Exporting’
“The Thompson/Shannons are the anti-Kardashians – an unprivileged and guileless family that gets along. … They’re not in denial of their problems, but they’re not defined by them, either. … Their antics offer a counterweight to the jealousy, striving, and backstabbing of the Housewives. And they defy the tropes assigned to their many female reality-show peers: the slut, the fame-seeker, the betrayer.”
When Wagner’s Music Was Hazardous To Your Health
“His music was seen not just as a symptom of the physical and sexual pathologies associated with a nervous modernity – everything from neurasthenia [nervous exhaustion] and degeneration to perversion and fatigue – but also as the direct cause of these.”
On Richard Wagner’s 200th Birthday, His Great-Grandson Slams Him Again
“The 66-year-old musicologist, writer and lecturer [Gottfried Wagner] sets himself apart from the other members of the sprawling Wagner clan by refusing, as he sees it, to sweep under the carpet the darker side of one of history’s most controversial composers.
Wagner’s Hitler Correspondence Will Not Be Published, Says Great-Granddaughter
Katharina Wagner: “It’s very difficult to make all the widely dispersed documents available to the public, because they are owned in part by all four branches [of the family] … If even just one says ‘No’, then I can’t do anything about it, no matter how outrageous I might find it.”