“While many find these disagreements disheartening, I will argue that they can be a good thing – if we manage to make them fruitful for a culture debate. Can we be sure that our beliefs about the world match how the world actually is and that our subjective preferences match what is objectively in our best interest?”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Dance Competitions For Preteen Girls Are Now Big Business
These events – individual and group numbers; tap, ballet, or “shuffle step for Jesus” – “form their own distinct subculture. Yet they are also distinctly American, not so different, underneath the false eyelashes, from Little League games, and raising a host of issues revolving around class, gender and parents’ aspirations for their children” – issues foregrounded, if not aggravated, by the Lifetime reality series Dance Moms.
Mixing Documentary, Anthropology And Art Film
Lucien Castaing-Taylor, director of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab: “It takes ethnography seriously. It’s not as though you can do ethnography with a two-day, fly-by-night visit somewhere. But it also takes ‘sensory’ seriously. Most anthropological writing and most ethnographic film, with the exception of some truly great works, is so devoid of emotional or sensory experience.”
Alexander Saxton, 93, Manhattan Preppie Turned Working Man, Novelist, Historian
The child of the editor in chief at Harper & Brothers, he was an Exeter and Harvard student who left school to become a regular Chicago laborer. His experiences working and living within the working class informed his entire career – as the author of three successful novels, a prolific left-wing journalist, and ultimately one of America’s top historians of the labor movement and race relations.
Crime Novelist RJ Ellory Busted For Writing Sock-Puppet Reviews
“Ellory, who won the Theakstons Old Peculier crime novel of the year prize in 2010 for his novel A Simple Act of Violence, was exposed by the crime writer Jeremy Duns on Twitter for posting reviews on Amazon under various identities … criticising his rivals and praising his own work.”
Where Big-City Actors Stay When They Perform Out-Of-Town
In the old Judy Garland movie Summer Stock, they got to share a farmhouse and a barn, but Actors’ Equity won’t allow such arrangements these days. Here’s a look at the accomodations that theaters and festivals provide, from stylish urban lofts to old Victorian houses to cabins in the woods.
The Internet’s Art Market Is Even More Full Of Fakes Than You Think
For instance, the head of the Giacometti Foundation says, “We counted the other day 2,005 fake Giacometti sculptures for sale [on a single Web site].” One recent statistical study “estimated that as many as 91 percent of the drawings and small sculptures sold online through eBay as the work of the artist Henry Moore were fake.”
John Cage: Composer, Conceptual Artist, Or Charlatan?
Anne Midgette: “In fact, Cage was anything but a clown, though like many profound thinkers who are profoundly misunderstood, he did nothing to counteract people’s misimpressions. … So why was he so important? The short answer is that Cage was in the vanguard of a way of thinking about art that became central to many artists after him, testing its mores and meanings and definitions. Where does the ‘real world’ end and ‘art’ begin; what makes one object ‘art’ and not another; what defines a performance?”
How John Cage Helped Me Handle My Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
Margaret Leng Tan, Cage collaborator and Diva of the Toy Piano: “Through Cage and his take on Zen philosophy, I have made a truce with my O.C.D. … When I am entangled in an idée fixe, one of Cage’s favorite Zen proverbs, ‘Taking a nap I pound the rice,’ offers a welcome antidote.”
Publishers Accept $69M Settlement In E-Book Price-Fixing Suit
“Big news in the Justice Department’s e-book price-fixing suit: Three of the five publishers accused of price-fixing – Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster – have agreed to pay $69 million to consumers to settle claims they illegally conspired to fix the price of e-books.”