“You might not have heard of the algorithm that runs the world. Few people have, though it can determine much that goes on in our day-to-day lives: the food we have to eat, our schedule at work, when the train will come to take us there. Somewhere, in some server basement right now, it is probably working on some aspect of your life tomorrow, next week, in a year’s time.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Director Of Utah’s Ririe-Woodbury Company To Step Down
“After a decade as artistic director of Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, Charlotte Boye-Christensen has announced she will step down at the end of the 2012-2013 season to take on more choreography work, although she doesn’t plan to move out of state.”
At Stratford Festival, Former Bookstore Clerk Rises To Become Executive Director
“A Stratford native, [Anita] Gaffney, 43, has been a festival employee since 1991, most recently as its administrative director … She succeeds another Stratford veteran, Antoni Cimolino, 50, who, after serving as executive director 1998-2007, then general director starting in 2007, was named the festival’s artistic director in March.”
Australia’s Oldest Indigenous Art Award Stuck In The Doldrums
The problems with the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (called “the Telstras” after the sponsoring company) “in its present form are multiple. They reflect the travails of the indigenous art scene after its state-subsidised over-expansion and the abrupt collapse of its wider market in recent years. The model for the exhibition and awards is almost three decades old, and completely outdated.”
Watch Ayn Rand Talk To Johnny Carson
“Besides hearing Rand distill her philosophy into a few TV-friendly sentences, you’ll also get another glimpse at late-night talk shows as they used to be.”
Salman Rushdie On The March Of Justice
“If you really look at the world with the long eye of history, now as compared to 200 years ago, the degrees of justice have increased. The age of the great empires is over. Many peoples – including my own country of origin, India – are now determining their own fate instead of having it determined from the outside. But history is one of those rivers that always moves in both directions at the same time.”
When Handel Came To London
It was exactly 300 years ago next month when ‘the Orpheus of our era” moved permanently to the British capital. Richard Wigmore recounts how Handel came to settle there, and why the employer he abandoned in Germany perhaps didn’t mind so much.
A Giant Trompe L’Oeil Sculpture Of A Piece Of Paper
“As you approach, you realize it is made of metal. It’s a sculpture, made of welded and painted steel that looks like a two-dimensional cartoon drawing of a three-dimensional piece of paper … that is three-dimensional if you get close, but looks two-dimensional if you stay at the bottom of the hill …”
Helen Gurley Brown, 90
“Helen Gurley Brown, who as the author of Sex and the Single Girl shocked early-1960s America with the news that unmarried women not only had sex but thoroughly enjoyed it – and who as the editor of Cosmopolitan magazine spent the next three decades telling those women precisely how to enjoy it even more – died on Monday in Manhattan. She was 90, though parts of her were considerably younger.”
Drowning In Debt, Atlanta Symphony Heads Into Contract Negotiations
“The city’s largest cultural group, having run up $5 million annual deficits in recent years, is facing a daunting accumulated debt nearing $20 million. … Symphony management has resolved that the bleeding must stop and is amid increasing fractious contract negotiations with the committee representing its 93 musicians to replace the four-year agreement that expires at midnight Aug. 25.”