The Japanese conductor, who over the past two years has dealt with esophageal cancer and major back surgery, had just begun a comeback at the Saito Kinen Festival. But after two performances, he reportedly contracted pneumonia and has withdrawn from the festival orchestra’s appearance in China this week.
Author: Matthew Westphal
Steve Jobs’s (Few But Big?) Mistakes In Product Design
“Design is his wheelhouse. Where … either in terms of aesthetics or usability … has he whiffed?” Christopher Shea offers a few suggestions (like the single-button mouse), and puts the question to readers.
Fiction Writers Imagine The Final Days Of Qaddafi
“A fall so sudden and dramatic is perhaps best told in fiction. So we asked eight top novelists to imagine this moment from [the Libyan dictator’s] perspective. What is the ‘King of Kings’ thinking as he fights for his life?”
Singing The Blues To Rumi And Omar Khayyam
“It’s very hard to take classical Persian poetry and make it sound like Al Green or Billie Holiday,” says Iranian-American singer Rana Farhan. But that’s just what she’s been doing since an odd sequence of serendipitous events six years ago. The combination has made her a star in Iran, and now the international jazz world is catching on.
Is This Hollywood Producer, After Major Brain Damage, Better Off Than Before?
In the early 1990s, Simon Lewis was on his way up in Hollywood. Then, in an auto accident, he “broke everything you could break and lost a third of one of his brain hemispheres.” After 15 years of surgeries and recovery, he now “reads articles on quantum mechanics for fun” and his “brain damage has made him literally incapable of making movies that are either silly or disposable.”
Reinventing The Paper Clip As Mass-Market Art Object (Or Toy)
ACCO Brands, the no. 1 paper clip manufacturer in the US, is introducing Klix, small hair-barrette-shaped stainless steel clips in bright colors that snap when closed. “It’s very fun,” says an ACCO executive, “It’s this clickiness.” It’s also 16 times the price of a regular paper clip.
Haruki Murakami Yanked From New Jersey School Book List
“Haruki Murakami’s venerated novel of love and mental illness, Norwegian Wood, has been pulled off a reading list for New Jersey teenagers after a rash of complaints from parents.”
New NASA Program Is Science Fiction (Literally)
“Time travel and warp drives may, alas, be out of the picture in a new partnership between NASA and Tor/Forge Books, which will see the science fiction publisher’s authors teaming up with the space agency to release a range of ‘scientifically accurate and entertaining’ novels”.
Coming Explosion Of URL Suffixes Is A Confusing Protection Racket, Says Esther Dyson
ICANN is set to introduce “a host of new Top-Level Domains (TLDs), the suffixes that go after the dot, such as .com, .org, and, soon, .anything. … [The] value formerly associated with Apple could now be divided into Apple.computers, apple.phone, ipod.apple, and so on. If this sounds confusing, that’s because it is.”
Oregon Bach Festival Names Successor To Founding Director
“Matthew Halls, 35, a bright British conductor who comes out of the early music movement, will replace founder Helmuth Rilling as artistic director at the Oregon Bach Festival at the end of the 2013 season. Rilling, who led the 17-day festival since its founding in 1970, will remain with the University of Oregon event as director emeritus.”