“Researchers are now moving from establishing facts about the Maya towards understanding the meaning of their rituals. The decipherment of their script has been the greatest achievement of recent years. The Maya invented what may be the most complex writing system ever devised. It had both alphabetic and pictographic characters, and the “spelling” rules seem to have been largely aesthetic. The same word could be written in a dozen ways. The new exhibition contains superb examples of the most florid, which look more like sculpture than writing.”
Blog
All In A Name
“The “mutation rate” in names is higher for girls than for boys. Parents, in other words, are more liable to be inventive when choosing a name for a baby girl. The researchers have found that for every 10,000 daughters born in America there is an average of 2.3 new names. For sons, the figure is 1.6. One possibility is that in a society where family names are inherited patrilineally, parents feel constrained by tradition when it comes to choosing first names for their sons. As a result, boys often end up with the names of their ancestors. But when those same parents come to choose names for their daughters, they feel less constrained and more able to choose based on style and beauty.”
Getting Inside Your Reading
A new interactive reading device expands the experience of reading. “You can get God’s eye view if you want, or you can go in and be part of the scene. You can flip a switch and transition into an immersive VR experience. You can fly inside and see what it feels like to be a blood corpuscle going through the heart.”
The Death Of Literary Criticism
What’s happened to literary criticism, asks James Wood. It’s been replaced by academic-speak. “For the first time in history, many poets and novelists are graduates of English studies, many of them put through the theory machine for good measure. Writers and academics teach together, attend conferences together, and sometimes almost speak the same language (Rushdie’s essays and academic post-colonialist discourse; DeLillo’s fiction and academic postmodern critique). But during the same period, literary criticism as a discourse available for, and even attractive to, the common reader has all but disappeared.”
Hadid In The Real World
Zaha Hadid “is the world’s foremost woman architect. Yet, until a recent explosion in work, she had built little. This is an award more for influence than for physical impact on the world. Hadid’s extraordinary designs have been instantly recognisable and seemingly omnipresent for more than two decades, well before she had realised any significant structures.”
Shrek 2 A Record Breaker
Shrek 2 took in $105 million its opening weekend. “The opening for “Shrek 2” broke or flirted with breaking a number of box-office records. The film’s weekend gross was second all-time only to “Spider-Man,” which earned $114.8 million in a single weekend in 2002. On Saturday “Shrek 2” broke the record for single-day ticket sales with $44.8 million. And if the preliminary numbers hold, the movie is expected to break the mark for biggest five-day opening, surpassing “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King,” which brought in $124.1 during its first five days in theaters last December.”
The Decline Of the Sit-com
The situation comedy is in decline. “Amid the hoopla of last week’s presentations to advertisers of the broadcast networks’ prime-time lineups for the fall, it became strikingly clear that the network situation comedy was in as bad a state as it has been in more than 20 years.”
A $46 Million Flop?
The movie Troy took in $46 million in its opening weekend. But that about qualifies it as a flop. “Industry statistics show that box office receipts typically fall 40 per cent between a movie’s first and second weekends. That means that unless interest in Troy picks up substantially over the next few weeks, the movie — which reportedly cost $185-million to produce, before marketing costs — will be a money-loser. Which is why studios dedicate millions of dollars to promote movies months in advance to get as many people as possible into cinemas during that first weekend.”
London On Top?
Is London the capital of the classical music world? That’s the claim by the city’s musicians who point to the city’s busy concert scenes and its five symphony orchetras.
Forging Gauguin (And Getting Away With It)
How did New York art dealer Ely Sakhai get away with forging and selling a Gauguin? “What was perhaps most interesting was how well this hustle exploited—and exposed—the frailties of the art marketplace. It is a world in which surprisingly few people are willing to stick their neck out and call a fake a fake, so that even as Sakhai’s scheme racked up victims, virtually no one was willing to call him on it. The forger knew this secret of the art world: It is tolerant of frauds, so long as the victims are in far-off places like Tokyo and too humiliated to raise a fuss. As if delivering a judo move, he used the particular quirks of art dealers against them.”