Author: Matthew Westphal

‘Take Things For Granted’ Is Actually Very Good Advice

Philosophy professor Neal Tognazzini: “I think there’s something distinctively valuable about allowing many aspects of your life — even the very fact of your life — to recede into the background, into a unconscious mental box we might label ‘presuppositions.’ I would go so far as to say that these presuppositions are what enable you to live a life at all.”

Secrets And Lies At The Heart Of Anton Chekhov’s Marriage

In May 1901, the great playwright married actress Olga Knipper – much to the dismay and confusion of his family and friends, who knew him to be a compulsive womanizer. Less than a year later, Knipper became severely ill and had to terminate a pregnancy. It turns out, as biographer Donald Rayfield has discovered, that the child could not have been Chekhov’s, and he almost certainly knew it.

Amazon Tries A Move Into Live Sports Broadcasting

“Amazon has pulled out all the stops to make its $40m (£34m) bet on the UK rights to the US Open – setting up a studio at Flushing Meadows and drafting in former players including Jim Courier, Greg Rusedski, Annabel Croft and Mark Petchey, as the company looks to prove it can match traditional broadcasters and become a credible home for live sport.”

Watch A Real Urban Planner Play ‘SimCity’

“SimCity is one of the greatest video game franchises of all time, if only because it demonstrates something important: Designing a city from scratch is very hard, and it’s impossible to make everyone happy all the time. That’s even more evident thanks to UC Berkeley PhD student Dave Amos, who studies urban planning and whose commentary on the game offers a hilarious criticism of both game design and planning bureaucracy.”

I Avoid Rereading My Old Books, But When One Was Made Into A Movie, I Had To

Meg Wolitzer: “As a rule, I rarely reread my own old writing, but instead I tend to ignore it, much the way someone might sidestep an old flame seen on the street years or even decades after a relationship has ended.” But with the film version of The Wife coming out – and already generating Oscar buzz – Wolitzer realized that she’d have to revisit the book in order to do press interviews. Here’s how she experienced the process.

An Enormous, Thrilling New Art Museum Opens Under An Old Bus Station Parking Lot

“Bulging white mounds rear up out of the ground in the middle of Helsinki, tapering to circular windows that point like cyclopean eyes around the square. Children scramble up the steep slopes while a skateboarder attempts to glide down one, past a couple posing for a selfie at the summit.” Oliver Wainwright visits the new Amos Rex museum in the Finnish capital.

Helpful Hints For Classical Musicians To Keep Press Interviews From Going Bad

It takes serious, intense study to become a professional classical musician – but that study doesn’t usually include media training. And being able to communicate with the press is important: the days of the genius artiste who can get away with doing publicity poorly or not at all are over, and a media misstep can be disastrous for a career. Writer Anya Wassenberg gets some experienced publicists to offer counsel.