“This is show business, first and foremost. I’m an artist. I was trained in Vaganova ballet my whole life. But ballet is a dying art form, and something has to change. Abstract contemporary dance is unfair to the audience. It is 100 percent imperative to put the audience’s enjoyment first.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
The Zany, The Cute, The Interesting: 21st-Century America’s Top Aesthetic Categories?
“[Of] the staggering array of verbiage we’ve developed for tracking styles of art and our responses to them, these unassuming, conversational words are some of those that speak most directly to ‘everyday practices of production, circulation, and consumption’ [of culture].”
There Are Two Parallel Haruki Murakamis
“But what most readers don’t know is that Murakami himself inhabits parallel realities, and not just at his writing desk. One is inside Japan; the other is nearly everywhere else, but especially in the United States. And in each, his behavior and reputation, and perceptions of both, are in many ways starkly divergent.”
Why We Need Trashy Novels (And We Do)
“We want to say that on the one hand are the good books, the hard books, the books that require dedication of the reader, of the work readers do. The books that Real Writers (apparently a self-selecting class) write. And then there are these others. Yet it’s a strange thing to watch book culture, which is itself in a perpetual stage of fear about its own decline, slice off pieces of its very own flesh.”
Literary Fiction And Genre Fiction May Overlap, But They’re Not The Same Thing
“After all, literary fiction can be plotted just as vigorously as genre fiction (though it doesn’t have to be). … A good mystery or thriller isn’t set off from an accomplished literary novel by plotting, but by the writer’s sensibility, his purpose in writing, and the choices he makes to communicate that purpose.”
Free To Be You And Me After 40 Years: Why Marlo Thomas Had To Create It
The now-classic children’s album’s driving force remembers, in 1971, searching for books for her 3-year-old niece – and finding only (what now seem to us) rigid gender stereotypes. “My god, she thought. This is what she’s going to be reading. This is all there is for her to read. What am I going to do? Then she thought: I’ve got to make something that will obliterate this.”
Free To Be You And Me After 40 Years: How Marlo Thomas Got It Made From Scratch
Back in 1972, there were no mainstream songs or stories telling little girls that they could be pilots as well as stewardesses or athletes as well as cheerleaders – let alone telling boys that it could be okay to cry. Record labels and publishers weren’t eager to make such content, either. Fortunately, Thomas was determined – and she knew lots of famous people who could help.
Free To Be You And Me After 40 Years: Has The Revolution Of Little Girls Been Won?
To a considerable extent, yes – though for little boys, things aren’t so clear. Dan Kois checks in with some of the album’s creators, tries it out on a group of today’s grade-schoolers – and talks with their parents, who grew up with those songs.
The Civilization That Ruled The Andes Before The Inca
“Long before the Incas walked the peaks and valleys of Peru in the 15th and 16th centuries, … the Wari reigned over land stretching from the highlands of central Peru, centered near the present-day city of Ayacucho, to the Pacific coastal zones below. … [They] were to the Inca as the Greeks were to the Romans.”
Medieval Europe’s Dancing Plagues And The Nocebo Effect
In an excerpt from his book Mind Over Mind: The Surprising Power of Expectations, Chris Berdik considers the wave of compulsive dancing that swept Strasbourg in the summer of 1518 – and whether it might be an example of Mass Psychogenic Illness, a large-scale manifestation of the “nocebo effect”, the placebo effect’s evil twin.