Author: Matthew Westphal

In Japan, You Can Hire Actors To Pretend To Be Your Friends Or Family

“[Ishii Yuichi’s] 8-year-old company, Family Romance, provides professional actors to fill any role in the personal lives of clients. With a burgeoning staff of 800 or so actors, ranging from infants to the elderly, the organization prides itself on being able to provide a surrogate for almost any conceivable situation.” Yuichi talks with journalist Roc Morin about what professionally pretending to be someone’s father or bridegroom is like and why Japanese people use – and need – the service.

Here’s Pakistan’s Martha Stewart (Only More Famous)

“Zubaida Aapa – the Urdu honorific for elder sister- is a homemaker, turned TV star, turned domestic goddess, and the closest thing Pakistan has to Martha Stewart, but with Stewart’s fame dialed up to 11. Since the nineties, … [Zubaida] Tariq has taught generations of homemakers how to raise their children, clean their homes, and make parathas. She has authored at least six cookbooks, doled out countless home remedies (totkas in Urdu) for kitchen, home, and child, and left satire in the wake of her outsize celebrity.”

How Lord Byron Invented Our Image Of The Wild Horse

“For most of history, wild horses were regarded as food, pests or a source of new tame animals. The remaking of the wild horse as an equine noble savage is a story taking in Romanticism, extinction, theatrical melodramas and near-naked ladies. And it begins with a grudge against a man named Mazepa in the 17th-century Polish court, and a disgraced poet.”

David Hallberg On His Struggle With Perfectionism

“As a young dancer, when approaching a step or lift or turn I deemed hard, I would say to myself, Don’t [expletive] this up. … At times I wondered if it was a form of superstition, that the very act of thinking Don’t [expletive] this up would protect me from any and all regrettable mistakes. But I had come to realize that the common thread among the disparate artists I admire most is that they do not protect themselves at all.” An excerpt from his new memoir.

Hyperlinks To Online Material Could Constitute Copyright Infringement If Lawsuit Succeeds

The case was brought by a freelance photographer against several publications, including Yahoo! Sports and the Boston Herald, for embedding a third-party tweet that included his photograph of star quarterback Tom Brady. As Krista L. Cox, an intellectual property attorney for various nonprofits, writes, “What if every time you provided a link, you had to worry that you might be sued for copyright infringement? … It would destroy the way we communicate today, including interactions on social media platforms.”

Court OKs Berkshire Museum’s Sale Of Art

“Judge John Agostini ruled that plaintiffs in two civil actions, and the state Attorney General’s Office itself, failed to make their cases to halt a large-scale deaccession by the museum. The judge is unsparing in his view that the Attorney General’s Office conducted an anemic review of the art sale after it was notified about it by the museum in June.”

Smithsonian’s Air And Space Museum To Get Seven-Year Renovation

“Given its four decades of life and enduring heavy traffic, it comes as little surprise that the museum is now in need of major renovations. Acting on severe structural degradation as well as a desire to breathe fresh life into its air and space exhibitions, the Smithsonian has announced that a sweeping, seven-year upgrade will commence this coming summer. Happily, … only half of the space will be inaccessible at any given moment.”