Angel, César, and Marcos Ramírez, now 18, had secure jobs dancing with the National Ballet of Cuba. But they gave them up to study at the Rock School in Philadelphia. Ellen Dunkel meets them. (includes video)
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What Memorials Of World War I Should Really Focus On
Duty and honor? Patriotism? Rebecca Onion reminds us of the truth about “the war to end all wars”: it was bloody, cruel, and basically pointless. “How, then, to commemorate a useless war that shouldn’t have happened — a black hole in history?” Slate‘s resident history maven suggests that we have a look at some of the antiwar literature and advertising campaigns of the time.
Cellphone Addicts In The Theater? Here’s One Broadway Star Who Calls Them Out Right From The Stage
Fortunately, Mike Birbiglia doesn’t do it quite the way Patti LuPone does. And he’s playing himself in his one-man Broadway show, The New One, so he can talk to offending audience members directly without breaking character. Here, with audio of recent examples, he explains how and why he does it.
Wolfgang Zuckermann, 96, Helped Midwife Off-Off-Broadway Movement And Invented Build-Your-Own-Harpsichord Kit
Late in life, he opened an English bookstore in Avignon; before that, in London, he wrote anti-consumerism and anti-automobile books. But he made his biggest mark in New York’s Greenwich Village in the 1950s and ’60s: he briefly ran the Off-Off-Broadway birthplace Caffe Cino, and he devised a kit that lets customers assemble their own harpsichords, enabling the modern revival and spread of the instrument.
National Book Awards 2018 To Sigrid Nunez’s ‘The Friend’, Jeffrey C. Stewart’s ‘The New Negro’
Alongside the fiction prize to Nunez’s novel about a bereaved writer and his Great Dane and the nonfiction prize to Stewart’s biography of philosopher Alain Locke, honors went to Justin Phillip Reed’s Indecency (poetry), Yoko Tawada and Margaret Mitsutani for The Emissary (translated literature), and Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X (young people’s literature). Isabel Allende became the first Spanish-language author to receive the lifetime achievement award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
St. Louis Ballet Dancer Found Dead In Rural Missouri Lake
“Raffaella Maria Stroik, 23, was reported missing Tuesday after a state park ranger found her unattended vehicle at Mark Twain State Park, about 100 miles northwest of St. Louis.” Her body was discovered floating in Mark Twain Lake Wednesday morning. She had joined St. Louis Ballet only last year.
How Do We Know These Bronzes Are By Michelangelo? Eight-Pack Abs, Short Big Toes, Messy Pubic Hair
It’s those features, common in his male nudes and rare in those of his colleagues, that led researchers at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge to be certain that the two “Rothschild Bronzes” were sculpted by Michelangelo — making them the only surviving works in that metal by the Florentine artist.
Oligarch Seller Of ‘Salvator Mundi’ Formally Charged In Major Monaco Corruption Scandal
Dmitry Rybolovlev faces charges of “trading in passive influence and violation of the secrecy of the investigation” as part of what Le Monde has described as “a vast influence-peddling scandal at the heart of Monaco institutions.” The billionaire — who in 2004 bought Donald Trump’s Palm Beach mansion sight unseen at an inflated price — is suing art dealer Yves Bouvier, and he is accused of getting Monaco’s former justice minister to influence the case.
OED’s 2018 Word Of The Year: ‘Toxic’
“The word was chosen less for statistical reasons, [the U.S. head of Oxford Dictionaries] said, than for the sheer variety of contexts in which it has proliferated, from conversations about environmental poisons to laments about today’s poisonous political discourse to the #MeToo movement, with its calling out of ‘toxic masculinity.'” The runners-up were “gaslighting” and “incel.” (Last week, rival dictionary Collins declared its word of the year to be “single-use.”)
Neighbors Are Suing The Tate Modern Because Its Visitors Keep Gawking Through Their Windows. So An Artist Installed Binoculars
Demonstrating that conceptual art and masterful trolling can be one and the same, Max Siedentopf says that his installation — which he has titled Please respect our neighbours’ privacy — will “just help visitors to enjoy Tate Modern’s most popular sight a little bit more and up close.”