88 titles, from Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine to Toni Morrison, Randy Shilts and César Chávez.
Author: Matthew Westphal
Activists Begin Moves To Preserve Moscow’s Architectural Monuments
“Preservationists are voicing growing concerns about Moscow’s architectural heritage and the state’s role in ensuring it survives. The controversial destruction of monuments has contributed to recent anti-government protests in Russia,” though current mayor Sergei Sobyanin is seen as more sympathetic to such concerns than his demolition-happy predecessor, Yuri Luzhkov.
Dancing About Architecture – And With It, Too
“Shobana Jeyasingh has choreographed for some strange and wonderful places. In 1989, her stage was the Champs-Elysées … In 2010, she had her dancers splashing through the serried ranks of fountains in the vast courtyard of London’s Somerset House. But her latest work, which sees her choreographing amid the glorious architecture of Venice, has proved her biggest challenge yet.”
Ballet BC Appoints Executive Director
Branislav Henselmann is currently “the executive producer for the Michael Clark Company in London. He has also worked as the artistic curator for New York City Ballet’s Choreographic Institute. He starts at Ballet BC in mid-July.”
Perth Gets A Second Orchestra
The Perth Symphony Orchestra, Australia’s newest professional symphonic ensemble, was created by conductor Jessica Gethin to take advantage of extra performance opportunities (including non-traditional formats and non-classical music) that the long-established West Australian Symphony may not be able to cover in Australia’s vastest state.
Pianist Brigitte Engerer Dead At 59
“She was schooled in the Russian tradition, but was not of Russia; indeed, her increasing commitment to the chamber music repertoire, her unremitting search for musical truth, and the broad brush of her pianism were unmistakably French.”
‘Social-Writing’ Website Gets New Superstar Member (And She’s Ready To Share)
Margaret Atwood “has signed up to Wattpad to share her writing with its online community of nine million other users. … [She] has posted two new poems on the website, is planning to share a piece of fiction this autumn and will also be the final judge of a poetry contest to be held in July.”
Is An Online-Only Museum Really A Museum At All?
“Middlesex University’s Museum of Domestic Design & Architecture (MoDA) closed its public gallery spaces last summer,” going online-only. MoDA’s senior curator insists “that MoDA is still a museum – after all, the point of a museum is to share collections and it will still do that.” She also “reject[s] the term ‘virtual museum’, which she said implies that it doesn’t exist in reality.”
Sin, Virtue, And Human Evolution
“Are human beings intrinsically good but corruptible by the forces of evil, or the reverse, innately sinful yet redeemable by the forces of good? … We are all genetic chimeras, at once saints and sinners – not because humanity has failed to reach some foreordained religious or ideological ideal – but because of the way our species originated across millions of years of biological evolution.”
Why Did The Ancients Build Stonehenge? National Unity, Say Researchers
After a decade of archaeological study, a team of scholars believes that the huge stone monument was built to mark the end of a longstanding east-west divide between the peoples of neolithic Britain.