“A writer should concern himself with whatever absorbs his fancy, stirs his heart, and unlimbers his typewriter. I feel no obligation to deal with politics. I do feel a responsibility to society because of going into print: a writer has the duty to be good, not lousy; true, not false; lively, not dull; accurate, not full of error.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
The ‘Cocktail Effect’ – How You Hear Your Friend Through The Surrounding Chatter
“Weaving your way through a crowded party, you spot an old friend. Despite the surrounding chatter you have no trouble filtering out the other voices to focus on her words alone. How the brain performs this trick, dubbed the ‘cocktail party effect’, has been identified for the first time.”
Just What Is Philosophy, Anyway?
Twenty-seven philosophers offer their answers (oh, about thirty of them).
Meet San Francisco Ballet’s Gennadi Nedvigin
In 1997, he was a teenager on tour in California with a French youth ballet troupe when SF Ballet director Helgi Tomasson walked right up to him backstage after a performance and offered him a contract – as a soloist.
Chicago Symphony Brings Its Shostakovich To Moscow
“The Chicago Symphony Orchestra performs in Russia for the first time since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union on Wednesday, hoping to show Russian audiences a different side of American cultural with its rendition of Soviet composer Dmitry Shostakovich.”
India’s Medieval Feminists: Women Sufi Poets
“Women Sufi poets were part of a widespread emancipation movement in the Indian Subcontinent and West Asia that started more than a thousand years ago and lasted till the nineteenth century. Interestingly, these poets fought for women’s rights at a time when that concept was still unformulated.”
Reinventing Clytemnestra As A Righteously Angry Mother
Playwright Gwyneth Lewis: “In Aeschylus, Clytemnestra is a wicked man-woman who upstages her husband, takes a lover and is later killed by Orestes, her son. Fiona Shaw pointed out to me that Clytemnestra is the only character in this family whose death isn’t avenged, so I decided to explore why not and to tell the story from her point of view. Imagine you were at home and you heard that, in order to win a war, your husband had allowed your daughter to be killed.”
Were Mean SOBs Born That Way? (Probably)
After collecting and analyzing both survey answers and saliva from their test subjects, researchers “found that some people have receptors that are especially sensitive to the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin, and that those people did nice things even when their survey answers revealed that they generally feared others in society.”
AP Style Guide Finally Gives In On Usage Of ‘Hopefully’
“The barbarians have done it, finally infiltrated a remaining bastion of order in a linguistic wasteland. They had already taken the Oxford English Dictionary … They had pummeled American Heritage into submission, though she fought valiantly … [Now] the venerated AP Stylebook [has] publicly affirmed (via tweet, no less) what it had already told the American Copy Editors Society: It, too, had succumbed. ‘We now support the modern usage of hopefully,’ the tweet said. ‘It is hoped, we hope’.”
What ‘Hopefully’ Shows Us About Word Usage
“In the end, usage really isn’t related to grammar or logic but is a realm of fashion. And this cuts both ways. Just because something is, linguistically, grammatical English doesn’t mean it’s expedient to use it. It’s like wearing jeans or a suit. Clothing tastes, like grammar instruction, were once rigidly prescriptive, too.”