“A dealer in rare Stradivarius violins coveted by the world’s top violinists was sentenced on Friday to six years in prison for embezzlement after his glittering global empire crumbled.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Salman Rushdie And John Le Carré End 15-Year Feud
“Fifteen years after Salman Rushdie called John le Carré a ‘pompous ass’ and le Carré: responded with an accusation of ‘self-canonisation’, one of the most gloriously vituperative literary feuds of recent times has come to an end. … The fight had its roots in le Carrés criticism of The Satanic Verses.”
Historic Venice Flooded By Nearly Five Feet Of Acqua Alta
Tourists are swimming in the Piazza San Marco; specially built pedestrian platforms meant to rise above the water are floating away.
Capturing All (Or At Least A Lot) Of Contemporary India In A Dozen New Plays
April de Angelis of London’s Royal Court Theatre: “Staying with us [in a Maharashtra guest house] were 12 Indian writers whose work we’d read but had not yet met. It was an exciting, curious, daunting moment: in three months we would be expecting them to deliver 12 new plays, and in some senses that depended as much on us as them.”
Ray Bradbury’s Final Works
“Two pieces released this fall were written late in life by the science fiction/fantasy master, who died in June at age 91.”
Oliver Sacks Wants To Destigmatize Hallucinations
“I think there’s a common view, often shared by doctors, that hallucinations denote madness – especially if there’s any hearing of voices. I hope I can defuse or de-stigmatise this a bit.” After all, the superstar neurologist has had a few himself.
Du Bois ‘n The Hood: Choreographer Kyle Abraham’s Pavement
“For [the piece], he went back to 1991, to reimagine the film Boyz ‘n the Hood, about gangs in South Central Los Angeles, which was released that summer. … He also wanted to look at the history that had preceded the strife represented in [that film] and found a pertinent source in The Souls of Black Folk, the 1903 book by W. E. B. Du Bois.”
Restoring The Color To An Ancient Marble Aphrodite
“To illustrate how a marble Aphrodite might have appeared to the ancients, we asked German archaeologist Vinzenz Brinkmann, who has pioneered techniques of color restoration, to create a photomechanical reconstruction – never before published – of the first-century A.D. Roman Lovatelli Venus.”
Golden Hoard: Ancient Thracian Treasure Found In Bulgaria
“Bulgarian archaeologists unearthed ancient golden artifacts, including bracelets with snake heads, a tiara with animal motifs and a horse head piece during excavation works at a Thracian tomb in northern Bulgaria.”
How Mint Became The Default Flavor Of Dental Hygiene
“To sweeten the breath, medieval Europeans could crush herbs into their tooth scrub or vinegar mouthwash; mint was sometimes used for this purpose, but so were rosemary, parsley, and sage. Other cultures chewed aromatic seeds – fennel seeds, cardamom, star anise – to abrade and sweeten the mouth.” How did mint gain primacy? A confluence of mass production, the US climate, and a biochemical trick.