“Fifteen minutes into an otherwise smooth interview, Battle takes a deep breath, stops talking and puts down the phone, never to return. No goodbye. No explanation. Nada. Even stranger is the fact that the interview-killing question wasn’t even a tough one. It was a softball query about how it feels to have her career still going strong as she approaches 70.” (Has she never heard of the Streisand Effect?)
Author: Matthew Westphal
Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum Will Reopen Next January
“[The Hood] is due to reopen on 26 January 2019 after a closure of nearly three years for an expansion and revamp by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects. The $50m project expands the museum’s space by 50% to over 62,000 sq ft, adds six new galleries and renovates the museum’s original 1985 Charles Moore building.”
Is The Latest Crop Of Gay Movies Erasing Gay Culture?
Tom Joudrey thinks so: “Gone unnoticed amidst this flurry of jubilation [for the likes of Call Me By Your Name and Love, Simon] has been, against my post-Brokeback hopes a dozen years ago, … a sort of amnesia that makes queerness blithely complicit in its own extinction. I realize this argument might be hard to follow, particularly amidst our post-Obergefell triumphalism, so it’s worth looking more closely into how queer films fell into a bad romance with straight validation.”
An Oral History Of Saturday Night Live’s ‘Black Jeopardy’
Writers Bryan Tucker and Michael Che (who created the sketch) and Kenan Thompson (who plays the Alex Trebek equivalent) talk about the genesis of the idea, the challenge of creating characters for various guest hosts, and the sketches they wanted to do but didn’t (yet). (includes video clips)
Closure Of Celebrated Rio Music Nightclub Becomes Symbol Of Brazil’s Crises
“It was Rio’s equivalent of the Blue Note or Ronnie Scott’s, a legendary downtown samba club famed for its caipirinha-fuelled jam sessions and for spawning some of the best young musicians in town. Today, though, Bar Semente lies abandoned, a graffiti-covered symbol of the city’s post-mega-event slump. An epitaph has been sprayed on its facade: ‘The Olympics, for who?'”
How Armenian Folk Dance Helped Sustain The Diaspora
“‘The two means of expression, outside of being a member of the church, to mark you as an Armenian are dance and food,’ [dance historian] Gary Lind-Sinanian says. ‘Those are the two every Armenian family practices to some degree.’ Still, every village seemed to have its own style, he said. ‘When people make their pilgrimages to some monastery for a festival, they could see, when various groups danced to a melody, by the way they danced, you could tell where they came from. It still happens today at Armenian-American conventions. You could have a dance taking place, and someone familiar with regional dances could go through it and say, ‘Oh, that group is from Fresno, they’re from Los Angeles, that’s Chicago, that’s Philadelphia, that’s Boston.””
What A Russian Smile Means (It’s Not What An American Smile Means)
“It’s not that Russians don’t smile, [cross-sultural studies professor Maria] Arapova explains. They do smile, and a lot. ‘We’re not such gloomy, sad, or aggressive people,’ she tells me. But smiling, for Russians — to paint with a broad brush — is an optional component of a commercial or social exchange and not a requirement of politeness. It means something different to smile — in fact, smiling can be dangerous.”
Would-Be Rock Star Involved In Trump-Russia Scandal Trolls Us All With New Music Video
“The video, for a song called ‘Got Me Good,’ begins with a man sitting in front of a wall of computer monitors — a hacker in Russia, it seems — and on those monitors we see real footage of the singer, Emin Agalarov, talking to the real Donald Trump. … Then the video shifts to a scene in which Emin walks through a hotel hallway with a Trump impersonator. They exchange a briefcase implied to be full of cash, as Emin sings to the Trump actor, ‘I wish you at least could be honest. I wish that you told me the truth.’ Soon, they are frolicking in a bed with several women. What makes this more than a silly spoof is that Emin Agalarov is one of the only people in the world who might have firsthand knowledge of what Trump did or didn’t do during his brief trip to Moscow in 2013.”
How Subatomic Physics Is Helping To Read The Ancient Scrolls Carbonized By Mount Vesuvius
“The scrolls [from Herculaneum] represent the only intact library known from the classical world, an unprecedented cache of ancient knowledge. … Yet the tremendous volcanic heat and gases spewed by Vesuvius carbonized the scrolls, turning them black and hard like lumps of coal. Over the years, various attempts to open some of them created a mess of fragile flakes that yielded only brief snippets of text. Hundreds of the papyri were therefore left unopened, with no realistic prospect that their contents would ever be revealed. And it probably would have remained that way except for an American computer scientist named Brent Seales, director of the Center for Visualization & Virtual Environments at the University of Kentucky.”
How St. Louis Has Reworked And Rethought The Gateway Arch: Philip Kennicott
50 years after Eero Saarinen’s landmark was dedicated, it has a new museum, a new promenade connecting it to the city, and a new concept. “The arch … has always been beloved because it binds together two feel-good ideas that are essential to American identity: a heroic past of grit and conquest, and a triumphant future of innovation. Now, well into the 21st century, the challenge is how to disentangle and even dismantle those ideas while salvaging the arch as a cultural object. The solution, mostly effective, has been to think in terms of connection, both to the city which hosts it, and to the deeper currents of history that led to its creation.”