“While the name of William Shakespeare is slapped ever more enthusiastically across theatre posters and radio and TV billings, universities are reducing the size of his typeface to make space for collaborators: most recently, the suggestion that Thomas Middleton wrote significant sections of All’s Well That End’s Well.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
‘The Yiddish Shakespeare’
“Although Jacob Gordin (1853-1909) was Russian, and his literary sources were indeed extremely well known, he himself was not particularly famous. Gordin became better known after he derived some of his plots and characters from Tolstoy and Turgenev … for theater audiences on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, transforming himself from journalist and religious reformer into a playwright who was actually famous.”
Why Do Lovers Of Literature Love Beating Up On Critics So Much?
“From Henry James to Heidi Julavitis, writers seem to delight in publishing manifestos that outline the book review’s shortcomings and inadequacies.”
The Greatest Author-vs.-Critic Feuds Of All Time
“The face-slaps, spitting contests, and pie fights that occur when one author turns his pen on another.”
A New Food Ethics Quandary: If Plants Are Sentient Enough To Communicate, Is It Okay To Eat Them?
A team of Israeli researchers found “that a pea plant subjected to drought conditions communicated its stress to other such plants, with which it shared its soil” – and those plants responded. “Is it morally permissible to submit to total instrumentalization living beings that, though they do not have a central nervous system, are capable of basic learning and communication?”
Adjusting Israel’s National Anthem To Not Exclude Israeli Arabs
The first line of “HaTikva” reads (in English translation), “As long as deep within him a Jew’s soul stirs …” In the wake of a silent protest by an Israeli Arab justice of the country’s Supreme Court, The Forward teamed up with singer Neshama Carlebach (daughter of the late Rabbi Shlomo) to offer – with just a few tweaks of the lyrics – a version of the anthem that doesn’t exclude 20% of Israel’s population.
Egypt’s All-Blind-Female Chamber Orchestra
The Cairo-based Al Nour Wal Amal Blind Girls Chamber Orchestra … is composed of sightless women from all walks of life who study the notes in Braille and learn the musical pieces by heart. … The women, who play both Western and Oriental classical music, are also singers and the orchestra doubles as a choir.”
Stephen King To US Government: Raise My &***#! Taxes Already!
“What charitable 1 percenters can’t do is assume responsibility – America’s national responsibilities: the care of its sick and its poor, the education of its young, the repair of its failing infrastructure, the repayment of its staggering war debts. … That kind of salvation does not come from Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Ballmer saying, ‘OK, I’ll write a $2 million bonus check to the IRS’.”
Where Modern Dance Meets Drag
“Trajal Harrell is a thinking choreographer. Ten years ago, he asked a question: What would have happened if, in the early sixties, drag queens from Harlem had brought their voguing downtown, to Washington Square, to perform with the pathbreaking postmoderns of the Judson Dance Theatre?”
The Source Of The New York State Reading Exam’s Notorious Pineapple Question
Last month, the eighth-graders of the Empire State were presented with a reading comprehension question about a hare who was challenged to a race by – not a tortoise, but a pineapple. (The hare won.) The originator of the tale, children’s author Daniel Pinkwater speaks out on the controversy. (He thinks the story works better with an eggplant.)