“The brain is not an equal opportunities organ, it seems. An imaging study of Chinese and Caucasian people has found that their brains respond less strongly to the pain of strangers whose ethnicity is different when compared with strangers of their own race.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
You Are What You Speak: Grammar Really Does Shape Thought
“Do English, Indonesian, Russian, and Turkish speakers end up attending to, partitioning, and remembering their experiences differently just because they speak different languages?”
A Grant To Keep Opera Alive In Orlando
“United Arts of Central Florida Board of Directors voted to earmark $200,000 for a proposal to keep opera alive in Central Florida” – with a semi-staged opera-in-concert presented by the Orlando Philharmonic next year – “following the Orlando Opera Company’s Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing in early June. […] The [ultimate] goal is for a new opera company to be in place when the $425 million Dr. P. Phillips Orlando Performing Arts Center opens.”
What Are Critics Really For, Anyway?
Anne Midgette: “The role of a critic is to cover a field. This doesn’t mean simply pandering to popular taste. It means doing one’s best to convey a sense of what is going on in a given discipline by writing about every possible side of it. It means trying to convey a perspective that a reader who doesn’t spend every night going to concerts/plays/films may not be able to gather himself; or offering a thoughtful take that might stimulate a reader who does go to everything to see something in a different light.”
The New-And-Improved Alice Tully Hall? Not Everyone Is So Impressed
Allan Kozinn: “I hate the new Tully Hall. To me it is everything Lincoln Center and its enthusiasts insist it is not. I find it corporate, sterile, claustrophobic and as acoustically arid a hall as I’ve ever heard. Similarly, everything now being said about the old Tully rings false to me.”
Amazon.com Fights Back Against Sales Taxes In Three States
“Seattle-based Amazon notified associates” – independent Web sites which link readers to the e-tailer in exchange for a commission on any resulting sales – “in Rhode Island and Hawaii that the company was no longer working with them as of Monday and Tuesday, respectively, because the states have passed laws to collect sales taxes on these transactions.” This move follows similar action by Amazon against associates in North Carolina.
Dutch Arts Official On The Lam After Embezzling Millions
“The former head of finance for the Dutch national arts funding body, the Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture (BKVB), is the subject of an international police hunt after the discovery that he had siphoned around €15.5m from the organisation’s accounts.”
Portrait Of The Artist (Rembrandt) As A Young Card Sharp
“[It] is the earliest depiction of Rembrandt as a hopeful teenager, not as he would have liked to have been seen but how he looked to a fellow art student in Amsterdam. Jan Lievens painted Rembrandt at the age of 16, as the central figure in The Cardplayers, which is believed to have been completed in 1623-24.”
Pina Bausch, Tender Mother Figure (Yes, Really)
Mark Swed: “Again and again Bausch stopped the dancers, praised them and ever so sweetly asked them to start over, as she lithely sidestepped falling bodies. … When the tension became unbearable or it looked as if the dancers would be beaten to a pulp, Bausch flashed a sly smile and handed out cookies. She had baked them that morning. They were delicious.”
Hey, Rugby Players! Are You Man Enough To Get Through A Ballet Class?
This week the coach of South Africa’s national rugby team defended an eye-gouging incident by one of his players by saying, in effect, that rugby ain’t ballet, it’s a violent sport. So South African Ballet Theatre invited the players to take a class with them and see how they fared opposite some real men in tights.