Yet the injured Bolshoi Ballet artistic director echoed his boss, general director Anatoly Iksanov, in suggesting that the attack had another mastermind: “It appears that someone had worked really well on that and pushed him into doing it, since every time, every moment, my every meeting with Pavel Dmitrichenko meant another threat, another show of dislike.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
People Who Can’t Feel Fear (And What We Can Learn From Them)
Studies of subjects who, due to damage to the amygdala, simply don’t experience terror are helping researchers figure out just how that almond-shaped bundle of neurons (a/k/a “the lizard brain”) works.
New York City Suspends Pension Contributions For Top Cultural Institutions
“New York City is withholding payment into a pension system that covers some employees at … some of its best known cultural institutions, including the American Museum of Natural History, the Brooklyn Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Brooklyn Academy of Music.”
Australian Government Proposes Controversial Media Reforms
Communications Minister Stephen Conroy [unveiled] Labor’s long-awaited media reform package, which includes a public interest test for media mergers and a toughened self-regulation system for print and online news media. … It would be backed by a public interest media advocate, which would rule on proposed media mergers and oversee the operation of the Australian Press Council in enforcing media standards.”
Jefferson Mays’s Latest Multiple-Personality Act
“While Jefferson Mays was performing in A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder in the fall of 2012 at Hartford Stage, he recalls, his wife kept overhearing variations on the same remark at intermission: ‘Isn’t it wonderful how they got actors who all look the same to play the different members of the D’Ysquith family?'”
Benjamin Britten Didn’t Want To Do Young Boys, He Wanted To Be Them
Paul Griffiths: “Meanwhile, the tide of performances and critical studies goes on confirming how deeply his music was affected by his irresoluble personal quandary: the wish to be forever a boy among boys. … Britten’s desire for youth and innocence, to possess them not sexually but in his own being, became, though impossible in life, the source of an abundant creativity.”
Pietro Bembo, One Of Renaissance Italy’s Top Renaissance Men
He’s best known today as the man who standardized Tuscan as the common literary tongue of Italy, but he was also a renowned art collector, an architectural historian and preservationist, secretary to a Borgia pope and eventually a cardinal himself, and a writer who pioneered the format of the modern book and of the then-wildly popular “pocket book”.
Inventors’ New Fad: The Useless Machine
“In a world dominated by smarter and smarter gadgets, one of the dumbest machines on earth is making a quiet comeback. Invented in the 1950s by an artificial-intelligence expert, the device is known as the ‘useless machine.’ … [Its] sole purpose: You turn it on, and it turns itself off.”
Bolshoi Boss Says Acid Attack’s Real Mastermind Is Still At Large
“The web of intrigue around Russia’s Bolshoi Theater continued to grow over the weekend after Anatoly Iksanov, the theater’s general director, told Russian television that he doesn’t believe that the mastermind behind the January acid attack on Sergei Filin, the ballet company’s artistic director, has been found.”
Aboriginal Rock Art Endangered By Australia’s Mining Boom
“[M]ining, industry and urbanisation surge across a landscape which harbours millions of images at more than 100,000 rock-art sites. State and territory heritage laws have proved weak in protecting the works, under governments keen to cash in on the mining bonanza.”