“American universities — once the dominant force in the information technology world — fell far down the ranks in a widely watched international computer programming contest held this week. Asian and Eastern European schools have been scoring increasingly well in the world championship. A U.S. school hasn’t won since 1997, when students at Harvey Mudd College proved best.”
Blog
ReganBooks To LA
Judith Regan says she’s moving her publishing and media group from Manhattan and relocating to Los Angeles. “In doing so, ReganBooks, which is part of HarperCollins, which is in turn owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, would be one of the few major book imprints to be based outside Manhattan and one of the first to leave New York for the West Coast. The move could shake up an industry that has long operated in a parochial, Manhattan-centric fashion, even as technology has made the location of a company less important.”
Sony BMG Restructures Classical Recording Business
Sony BMG says it is restructuring its classical music business under the name Sony BMG Masterworks. “It is intended not only to evoke past glories – Masterworks was CBS’s flagship classical line long before Sony bought the company from CBS in 1989 – but also to signal a renewed commitment to the core classical repertory.”
Has Opera Lost Its Personality?
Lisa Saffer on what’s wrong with today’s opera world: “I think the business has shifted recently: money speaks more than it should, and that means taking safe choices: people have become too afraid of making mistakes. Singers get talked at the whole time and coached within an inch of their lives – and the result is a passivity which depresses me. There’s plenty of polish around, but the rough edges which give the music character are being ironed out. We need more singers with something of their own to say, singers who engage spontaneously with the music.”
Judith Regan – The Angriest Publisher In New York?
Judith Regan is “arguably the most successful publisher in the world today, she runs a small imprint with a huge hit rate. So far this year, ReganBooks – part of the HarperCollins empire – has notched up 11 titles in the New York Times bestseller list, including four number ones in the space of six weeks. Even her critics describe her as the smartest woman in publishing. And yet they also have a few more superlatives for her, including the “angriest woman in the media” and – if Vanity Fair magazine is to be believed – a strong candidate for the nastiest person in New York.”
Mona Lisa In Her New Home
The Mona Lisa gets a new gallery home of her own, and crowds throng to the Louvre. “The Mona Lisa is not so much “hung” on its special wall as set, like a jewel, within it. With its stylishly brushed sgraffito surroundings, at once bare and luxurious, and its solitary magnificence behind glass, it’s for all the world like a watch in Cartier’s window. You need to be in the right frame of mind, but you can, for the first time in my memory, get a decent acquaintance with the Mona Lisa. Intimacy, even. So it’s finally possible to ask yourself critically: is she worth it?”
Dana Gioia: Why Books Matter
“A strange thing has happened in the American arts during the past quarter century. While income rose to unforeseen levels, college attendance ballooned, and access to information increased enormously, the interest young Americans showed in the arts — and especially literature — actually diminished. That individuals at a time of crucial intellectual and emotional development bypass the joys and challenges of literature is a troubling trend. If it were true that they substituted histories, biographies, or political works for literature, one might not worry. But book reading of any kind is falling as well.”
France: Fighting Off Google’s World-Wide Domination
Does Google’s global reach create “the risk of a crushing domination by America in the definition of the idea that future generations will have of the world?” The president of the Frnech National Library believes so. “Europe, he said, should counterattack by converting its own books into digital files and by controlling the page rankings of responses to searches. His one-man campaign bore fruit. At a meeting on March 16, President Jacques Chirac of France asked Mr. Jeanneney and the culture minister, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, to study how French and European library collections could be rapidly made available on the Web.”
Vintage US Propaganda Films From The Marshall Plan
The Marshall Plan helped rebuild Europe after WWII. “But in addition to rebuilding, it also plowed about $650-million into information dissemination, including the creation of more than 260 films to help convince the populations of 16 disparate countries to jointly accept American aid and embrace U.S.-style democracy. The films were seen everywhere, from movie palaces in big cities such as Paris to tiny, mountainous villages in countries like Portugal and Italy. But until recently many of them had never been seen in the United States because of a 1948 law prohibiting Americans from being propagandized with their own tax dollars, a restriction removed only 15 years ago.”
Land Of (Theme Park) Lincoln
A new theme park/museum based on Abraham Lincoln opens this week. “The museum, which opens to the public April 16 a few blocks from the Illinois state capitol, is an architectural flop that turns Lincoln’s life into the storyline for a mawkish indoor theme park. It puts us on a slippery historical slope, where the unreal blurs with the real and ultimately upstages it.”