Author: Matthew Westphal

Teaching Girls To Code By Teaching Them Dance

“STEM From Dance [is] a New York City-based nonprofit founded by Yamilee Toussaint — an MIT grad who’s been dancing since age 5. The program targets middle and high school girls of color, who are vastly underrepresented in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields, and might not otherwise see STEM as an option or be encouraged to try it.”

New York City’s Been The Capital Of Tap Dancing For Two Centuries

“In the 1800s, tap appeared along the East River at Catherine Market, where slaves from Manhattan, New Jersey and Long Island would congregate. ‘They were coming in to sell herbs and roots on their days off — they were allowed by their masters to do that — and they also had their dancing skills to sell. … They’d put down pieces of wood they called shingles and do a jig and a breakdown for money.'”

‘Football’s Coming Home’ – Unpacking England’s World Cup Anthem

Rebecca Mead has a go at the 1996 song whose official title is “Three Lions”: “It has been suggested that the song is about the heartbreaking condition of being a fan, which, in soccer-centric terms at least, it is. But it is also a song about English defeat — or, to put it more precisely, English defeatedness. … It’s a song about decline and regret and loss, about the tempting allure of resignation — the English emotional default — and the terrible pain of hopefulness.”

Habsburg Culture Is Becoming Cool Again

“‘Every few weeks I do a search on Twitter and there is an incredible benevolence about the Habsburgs,’ says Eduard Habsburg, Hungary’s ambassador to the Vatican and the former ruling family’s unofficial social-media maven. ‘There is definitely renewed interest.’ The reasons for this burst of enthusiasm are nuanced, even contradictory. This year’s centennial of the end of the first world war, and of the empire’s collapse, is part of the explanation. So is a sense that the anxieties of the late imperial period, years of disorienting change in politics and society, overlap with today’s.”

Documentarian Frederick Wiseman Insists He Is Not ‘A Fly On The Wall’

“It’s an insulting term. Most flies I know aren’t conscious at all, and I like to think I’m at least 2% conscious. … I come across this thing as a matter of chance, and maybe occasionally good judgment. I take the risk of shooting it because I think it might be interesting – then my job as an editor is to decide what it is saying, whether I want to use it, in what form, and where I’m going to place it.”

In 2018, What Makes Someone A ‘Southern Writer’?

“Far more urban, far more ethnically and culturally and politically diverse, the South is no longer a place defined by sweet tea and slamming screen doors, and its literature is changing, too. ‘It is damn hard to put a pipe-smoking granny or a pet possum into a novel these days and get away with it,’ the novelist Lee Smith once said.” Even so, Margaret Renkl has a answer to the question – one that’s paradoxical and somewhat painful.

Meet The Man Who Got A Best Choreography Tony Nomination For A Straight Play (‘Harry Potter And The Cursed Child’)

“[Steven] Hoggett … did not win the Tony. (That went to Justin Peck for the more traditionally dance-heavy Carousel.) But the recognition was well deserved: His choreography and movement direction for the two-part Cursed Child is no less meticulous and detailed than any dance number, and as important to the theatrical language of the play as the writing, by Jack Thorne, and the direction, by John Tiffany.”