“Ms. Sereny’s books were as much psychological studies as historical ones. As her work made plain, she was interested less in plumbing the ‘what’ of history’s evil deeds than she was in the ‘why’ of their perpetrators. Few people if any, she often said, were born evil; instead, she argued, they were made that way by traumatic conditions that could generally be located in childhood. What interested her above all was conscience.”
Author: ArtsJournal2
Everything We Owe To Alan Turing, On His 100th Birthday
“All of modern computing is underpinned by this notion. Every piece of software you use is running on layers of simulated computers that are as powerful as the physical hardware they’re running on — and as powerful as each other. A program running on a simulated Turing Machine works exactly the same way as one running on a non-simulated one; simulation has no effect on the complexity of the programs that can be run.”
What Is This Thing Called Love? And Why Is It Still So Damned Confounding?
“May we all — the women, anyway — put down the self-help books that haven’t exactly been doing us any good anyway. Love is a greater thing than arranged marriage, and it’s a greater thing than daddy issues and attachment theory. It can transcend it all, as long as you know what the true barriers are.”
Dance Explodes Onto The (Tablet-Sized) Screen
“‘Fifth Wall,’ the title of the work and a new application available only for iPads, is the latest offering from the 2wice Arts Foundation, which published a revered biennial magazine of the same name. Its last print issue appeared in 2009. Now 2wice has gone digital, but not in the usual way that magazine applications transfer copy from one format to the other. Essentially the iPad app — in the form of an interactive performance — is the new issue of the magazine.”
Daniel Barenboim On Germany, Israel, And Wagner
“Hitler made Wagner into a prophet. But Hitler, of course, reinterpreted even the worst things Wagner wrote about the Jews in a way for which Wagner cannot be held responsible.”
Who Remembers National Book Award Finalists? The Internet, Of Course
On a new National Book Foundation site that commemorates all of the finalists and winners, “the fun is in happening upon the lesser-known, like the The Balloonist, MacDonald Harris’s 1977 novel ‘about a Swedish inventor and his two companions who embark on a hydrogen-balloon voyage to the North Pole at the end of the 19th century.'”
Not Getting Parts? Asian-American Actors Head To YouTube Instead
“When it comes to Asian American actors and their younger YouTubing peers, who should be schooling whom? At a time when Asian American actors like Kang struggle to score the limited roles open to them in film and TV, YouTubers like Higa are amassing huge audiences without going to a single cattle call, pulling in six-figure salaries from the online ads that accompany their broadcasts. Both groups collide on You Offend Me, You Offend My Family, a new online network that’s part of YouTube’s expanding stable of channels dedicated to original programming.”
To Steal A DalÃ, All Thief Needed Was A Black Bag
“The man who stole a drawing by the Surrealist painter Salvador Dalà on Tuesday wore only the most basic of disguises: that of an everyday gallery visitor, walking past the Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst works on display. And he brought only the most basic of tools for his heist: a black shopping bag.”
Not Sexy Enough: Desmond McCarthy’s Original Review Of James Joyce’s Ulysses
1923: “The author has been compared to Rabelais. He has only in common with Rabelais a gust for and an exuberant command of words; a like avidity for verbal analogies and assonances, which he carries to a point characteristic of a peculiar mental aberration which used to be called puns, alliterations, or repetitions, which here and there flash into wit, or form an amusing or brilliant collocation of vocables, but more often make an echoing rumble which is not addressed to the intelligence; he flings about a lot of dirty words as well as crashing learned ones. And here all resemblance stops between the author of the inestimable life of the Great Gargantua and that of Ulysses.”
Marina Abramovic Hates MoMA, And A Lot More
“There was this one piece where I almost died lying in the burning star. My hair was burning; I was burned everywhere. In the morning, my grandmother was in the kitchen making breakfast. She saw me and thought she saw the pure devil and threw everything on the floor and ran away.