“When the first issue of its new Chinese-language edition appears next month, the London-based literary journal Granta … will have a presence in four of the five most widely spoken languages. But plans for the globalization of a leading quarterly that proudly calls itself ‘the magazine of new writing’ don’t stop there.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Enormous Frank Lloyd Wright Archive Headed To New York
“The Modernist architect Frank Lloyd Wright wasn’t a hoarder. But he did save just about everything – whether a doodle on a Plaza Hotel cocktail napkin of an imagined city on Ellis Island … or a model of Broadacre City, his utopian metropolis.” This collection, locked in storage since Wright’s death, “is moving permanently to New York in an unusual joint partnership between the Museum of Modern Art and Columbia University’s Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library.”
On Reconciling Neuroscience, Atheism, And Meaning In the Universe
Christof Koch of Cal Tech: “I’m not a conventional atheist who believes it’s all just a random formation. I believe there is meaning. But as you said, I don’t believe in a personal god or any of the standard things that you’re supposed to believe as a Christian. … This God I have in mind is very ephemeral. It’s much closer to Spinoza’s God than to the God of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel.”
How The Human Brain Is Like An Old European City
“We effectively have three evolutionary versions of brains in our heads. Our brains are rather like a city that has existed since ancient times” – a historic core (the brain stem), later neighborhoods expanding outward (the limbic system), and outer areas with modern office and techolopgy parks (the cortex and its lobes).
Dance Isn’t Just Invading Art Museums, It’s Settling In
“In recent years the form has become a high-profile fixture in museums, galleries and international exhibitions. What at first seemed like a run-of-the-mill trend has developed into a thoughtful integration. … And performance series are being incorporated into historical surveys.”
Afghanistan’s New History Textbooks Are Missing A Few Things
“New history textbooks from the Afghanistan government leave out some key episodes in the country’s recent history. The BBC’s Bilal Sarwary explains, from Kabul.”
Actor Michael Clarke Duncan, Star Of The Green Mile, Dead At 54
“A former ditch digger for a natural gas company in his native Chicago, Duncan began his Hollywood saga as a celebrity bodyguard in the mid-1990s. He received his first big acting break … in the big-budget 1998 movie Armageddon … [and] received an Academy Award nomination for his moving portrayal of a gentle death row inmate in the 1999 prison drama The Green Mile.”
Alan M. Kriegsman, 84, First Dance Critic To Win A Pulitzer
“[He was] a critic for The Washington Post whose fervid prose style earned the first Pulitzer Prize for dance coverage and who chronicled an era of surging popular enthusiasm for dance in forms ranging from classical ballet to break dancing” over a 30-year career.
Calixto Bieito Mashes Up The Forest Of Arden, Birnam Wood, Etc.
“A huge pile of soil has been tipped over the floor; actors writhe and squirm through the mulch beneath a blasted tree festooned with red balloons. It looks like a cross between a garden centre, a children’s party and one of Samuel Beckett’s bleaker visions. It is in fact the setting for Bieito’s latest work, Forests – a piece for which the unpredictable but often brilliant Catalan director has scoured the works of Shakespeare for every mention of a wood, a copse or a bosky glade, and cut-and-pasted them into an epic, arboreal mash-up.”
Could M+ Do For Hong Kong What The Opera House Did For Sydney?
“Sitting smack on the shores of a bustling harbour, in the heart of an international city, looking across the water to skyscrapers, and flanked by trees and lawns: the parallels with the Sydney Opera House are manifest. Or at least they will be. Hong Kong’s M+ museum of visual culture hasn’t actually been built yet, or even designed.” (The competition process begins this month.)