Frank Bruni: “We in the media love the clear-cut drama of transitions. They’re easy to grasp and frame. And in the case of the Vatican, they come with majestic visual backdrops, colorfully costumed characters: a pageant extraordinaire. It looks splendid on the front page and even better on the nightly news.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Hilary Mantel Walks Into Controversy With Remarks On Kate Middleton
“Award-winning author Hilary Mantel [Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies] found herself surrounded by a storm of controversy Tuesday, as excerpts emerged from a recent lecture in which she skewers what she views as the public’s simplified view of Kate, Duchess of Cambridge.”
Patricia Cornwell Awarded $50.9 Million In Lawsuit
A US federal court jury found that the mystery novelist’s “former financial company cheated her, her wife, and her company out of tens of millions of dollars.”
Can A New Prize Encourage Playwrights To Write Scripts In Yiddish?
“The National Yiddish Theater-Folksbiene is announcing a new play contest to encourage writers and directors to conceive and develop new works in Yiddish. The winning play or musical will be showcased during the first New York International Festival of Jewish Performing Arts, in 2015 to commemorate the centennial of Folksbiene (Yiddish for ‘people’s theater’), the longest continuously running Yiddish theater in the world.”
When Art Critics Change Their Minds
“How does this happen with a person who supposedly has smart-enough eyes to operate as a critic in the first place? Does the mood of the times influence critics’ tastes? The high or low opinions of other critics? A lack of familiarity with a given medium or artist? And what do critics say of other critics who change course?” A passel of critics weigh in (and ‘fess up).
Amazonian Cannibals At King Charles’s Court
“In August of 1563, Michel de Montaigne, the famous French essayist, was introduced to three [indigenous Brazilians] who were visiting Rouen, France, at the invitation of King Charles the Ninth. The three men had never before left Brazil, had just been subjected to a long interrogation by the king (who was 13 years old at the time), and if they had not already contracted some dangerous European illness, they were surely undergoing a rather severe case of culture shock. Despite this, they still had enough poise to lucidly respond to Montaigne’s questions about what they thought of their new surroundings.”
Portugal’s Economic Distress Channeled Into A Card Game
“The name of the game was ‘Vem Aí A Troika,’ or ‘Here Comes the Troika.’… When it came out in November, its creators, one of whom is a former university math professor, promised: ‘Now you, too, can bring the country to ruin’.”
Russians Say New Mariinsky Theatre Two Is So Ugly It Should Be Torn Down
The design and construction of the venue, a second stage for the Mariinsky’s opera and ballet performances, “enraged, first, Petersburg citizens and, then, Moscow intellectuals, who are now collecting signatures for a petition to the governor of St. Petersburg, demanding that the new theatre be razed to the ground.”
Nacho Duato To Direct Berlin State Ballet
The Spanish choreographer, who will keep (for now) his post leading St. Petersburg’s Mikhailovsky Ballet, begins his term in the German capital in 2014. He will succeed Vladimir Malakhov, who announced his departure a few weeks ago, complaining of a lack of support from Berlin’s government.
Rescuing Mali’s Mosques And Manuscripts: EU Help Brings Problems
Naturally Malians and foreign scholars are grateful for financial aid from UNESCO and the European Union in preserving the ancient documents and repairing the historic buildings of Timbuktu and Djenné, especially after the recent invasion by hard-line Islamist rebels. Yet the rules around such funding are sometimes counterproductive – including, in one case, because the amounts requested are too low.