Martha Nussbaum, 71, is the author or editor of more than 40 wide-ranging books covering topics including the place of the emotions (including negative ones like disgust) in political life, the nature of human vulnerability, the importance of liberal education and connections between classical literature and the contemporary world. She is also known for helping to advance the so-called capabilities approach to economic development, which holds that progress should be measured by things like increases in life expectancy and education, rather than simply by increases in income.
Blog
Here Are The World Heritage Sites Threatened By Climate Change
Here we show that of 49 cultural WHS located in low-lying coastal areas of the Mediterranean, 37 are at risk from a 100-year flood and 42 from coastal erosion, already today. Until 2100, flood risk may increase by 50% and erosion risk by 13% across the region, with considerably higher increases at individual WHS.
Literary Hoax, ‘The Most Underappreciated Genre In History’
Counterfeits such as James Macpherson’s Fragments of Ancient Poetry and Clifford Irving’s Autobiography of Howard Hughes “incubate the circumstances of their composition, weaponizing the prevailing nostalgias and channeling the anxieties of their era while providing a window into the hearts of their author. They are, in other words, literature.”
Syson Siphoned: Met’s Departing Department Chair to Direct Fitzwilliam; 2 Future Stars Emerge
Luke Syson, who in 2012 came to the Metropolitan Museum from the National Gallery, London, becoming the Met’s chairman of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts in 2014, is now poised to join the wave of high-level departures from our country’s preeminent museum.
Catching Up, As Always: Recent Listening In Brief
Randy Waldman, Superheroes (BFM Jazz)
Kate McGarry, The Subject Tonight Is Love (Binxtown Records)
Will Tiny Books The Size Of Your Hand Change The Way We Read?
The tiny editions are the size of a cellphone and no thicker than your thumb, with paper as thin as onion skin. They can be read with one hand — the text flows horizontally, and you can flip the pages upward, like swiping a smartphone.
‘We Were Promised Better Worlds, And All We Got Was This Lousy Headset’ – Consumers Cool On Virtual Reality Games
“VR was supposed to be a revolution, with companies like Oculus pioneering a whole new way for gamers and non-gamers alike to be immersed in digital environments … But for all the hype we have very little consumer interest to show for it.”
Galleries Pile On The Amenities As They Compete For An Audience
For large and now even midsize galleries, custom architecture has become as important as it has long been for museums, with all-new or re-engineered spaces to add restaurants, kitchens, gift shops, bookstores, and black box spaces and auditoriums for performance, film screenings and staged events.
A Cemetery With A Playwright-In-Residence
Playwright Patrick Gabridge is artist-in-residence at the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Mass. “[His] mandate is to bring theatre to the graveyard in a way that avoids the clichés about ghosts and ghouls, and instead focuses on the beauty of the space’s environment and the significance of its history.”
Bill Rauch Talks About How Artistic Leaders Lead
“I’m collaborative perhaps to a fault, both in artistic leadership and in the rehearsal room. I think I’ve become a theatre artist and a theatre leader—an arts leader—because I can’t do things on my own. I have to be in dialogue with people who are smarter than me, who know more about any number of things, who will question how I’m living my values with any given decision in ways that it would not have dawned on me to question.”