Author: Matthew Westphal

The Best-Foreign-Language-Film Oscar Has Already Affected Politics In The Country That Won It

The award to A Fantastic Woman, about a transgender waitress dealing with the death of her partner, “has been enough to rekindle debate over a gender-identity bill that had been lagging in Chile’s Congress for nearly five years. What was once a proposal with partisan backing is now seeing support from both progressive and conservative legislators.”

‘For Decades, Our Coverage Was Racist’: National Geographic Fesses Up

Editor in chief Susan Goldberg: “I’m the tenth editor of National Geographic since its founding in 1888. I’m the first woman and the first Jewish person – a member of two groups that also once faced discrimination here. It hurts to share the appalling stories from the magazine’s past. But when we decided to devote our April magazine to the topic of race, we thought we should examine our own history before turning our reportorial gaze to others.”

Le Figaro Music Critic: How Symphony Orchestras And Conductors Are Changing

Christian Merlin (in part two of an interview whose first half dealt with changes in music criticism): “I think we’re living in an era, at least in the West, where the cult of an individual is no longer in fashion: rather, we’re looking for integration, collaboration, involvement of everyone. The first person to really embody this change was Simon Rattle. There are 128 musicians in the Berlin Phil, and Rattle would always say ‘I am the 129th’. That doesn’t mean that there were no tensions; there were enormous ones – perhaps precisely because the musicians had been used to a conductor who decides everything!”

Atlanta Ballet To Increase Its Ranks By Almost A Third

“Two years ago, when Atlanta Ballet appointed Gennadi Nedvigin as its fourth artistic director, he voiced a vision to increase the company’s size, add a main stage production in the fall, and appear in new venues in Atlanta and beyond. Despite a major turnover last spring, he’s well on his way to realizing that vision. Atlanta Ballet is announcing its 2018-19 season with plans to expand the company from 32 to 42 artists.”

Lost Work By Galen, Father Of Medical Science, Found In Ancient Monks’ Hymnbook

A translation into Syriac of one of the 2nd-century Greek physician’s treatises has been discovered as a palimpsest on the pages of an 11th-century Syriac psalter that once belonged to the Monastery of St. Catherine in the Sinai. Researchers at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Silicon Valley are now scanning the book to recover as much text as possible.