Over the past century we’ve vastly increased the time and money invested in science, but in scientists’ own judgement we’re producing the most important breakthroughs at a near-constant rate. On a per-dollar or per-person basis, this suggests that science is becoming far less efficient.
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Ai Weiwei Says He’s Done With Museum Shows — And China May Be Done With Him
“Q: But are you allowed to go back?
A: You never really know … they told me I’m free, I’m allowed to go back.
Q: But you’re not sure that they’re telling you the truth?
A: I don’t know if they even know the truth.”
Steve McQueen And Viola Davis On Hollywood, Race And Power
“MCQUEEN: What’s happening with #MeToo and Time’s Up is amazing — these are huge, giant steps. But I just feel sometimes, as a black filmmaker, that it’s still going around in circles.
DAVIS: It can’t just be ‘This is a time for female rage, so this is a time for female-centric movies and maybe some black artists.’ It should’ve been time years ago. This is what it always should be.”
Hit Flamenco Singer Finds Herself At Front Of Cultural-Appropriation Wars
“Throughout her rise to fame, Rosalía has been mired in a debate over her supposed appropriation of an art form with gitano origins. The 25-year-old star is not gitana, nor is she from Andalusia, the birthplace of flamenco. She’s from Catalonia, the northern Spanish region now famous for its independence bid last year. She’s been accused of capitalizing on southern, gitano culture — for adopting an Andalusian accent, sprinkling Caló (the Spanish Romani language) into her songs, dressing like a gitana and using Roma imagery in her music videos.”
82-Year-Old Dance Professor Stars In Her First Head-Bangin’ Hard Rock Video
Dance anthropologist Judith Lynne Hanna, who (on top of her scholarly work) has served as an expert witness in legal proceedings against exotic dancers, “has spent her career getting us to think about dance’s relationship to society. … She hadn’t performed since college when she got a call from a music video producer, who caught a video of her dancing with her 13-year-old grandson. The rockers of Egg Drop Soup loved her energy and flew her out to Los Angeles for a day-long video shoot. We spoke to Hanna about the experience.”
H. Peter Stern, Co-Founder Of Storm King Art Center, Dead At 90
“He and his father-in-law, Ralph Ogden, owners of a business that manufactured metal fasteners for construction and home use …, co-founded [the center] in Mountainville, N.Y., and developed it into a prestigious outdoor sculpture museum with modern and contemporary works arrayed over a vast pastoral landscape.”
Rare Ancient Image Of Jesus Discovered In Negev Desert
The painting of Jesus of Nazareth with John the Baptist — badly deteriorated but perceptible with high-tech photography and potentially restorable — is on the wall of the baptistery in a ruined 5th- or 6th-century Byzantine church. “In contrast to the Western image of Jesus as someone with flowing long hair and, sometimes, a beard, the Shivta painting shows him in the Eastern style with short curly hair, a long face and an elongated nose.”
Roy Clark, 85, Country Guitar Wizard And Co-Host Of ‘Hee Haw’
“While Mr. Clark’s musicianship and technical abilities were sometimes overlooked by critics who saw only the hayseed star of Hee Haw, he said he had few regrets about his career path. … “I’ve seen too many great guitar players sitting unnoticed on a stool in an orchestra. I said, do I want to be there, playing great and nobody knows it, or do I want to be out front with the lights on me, giggling and laughing, playing guitar and rolling my eyes and they say ‘Golly, this guy’s great?'”
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, Longtime New York Times Book Critic, Dead At 84
“In one of journalism’s most challenging jobs, Mr. Lehmann-Haupt was The Times‘s senior daily book critic from 1969 to 1995 … Readers and colleagues called him a judicious, authoritative voice on fiction and a seemingly boundless array of history, biography, current events and other topics, with forays into Persian archaeology and fly fishing.”
David Hockney Smashes Record For Most Expensive Work By Living Artist
With a total price of $90.3 million at Christie’s last night, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972) became the most expensive piece by a living artist ever sold at auction. Even more unusually, “the Hockney painting went to the block without any type of guarantee — almost unheard of in this day and age, when consignors know how to play the big auction houses off against one another.”