Blog

Look What Has Become Of Reading! (It Ain’t Pretty)

The first decade of the 21st century was a transitional one in terms of reader-writer relations, its habits now as foreign as those of Edward R. Murrow’s America. Gone are the happy days when we dialed up to submit a comment to Salon.com, only to be abused by Glenn Greenwald or destroyed — respectfully — by the academics at Crooked Timber. Back then, we could not have imagined feeling nostalgic for the blogosphere, a term we mocked for years until we found it charming and utopian. Blogs felt like gatherings of the like-minded, or at least the not completely random.

Why We All Like Oscar The Grouch Better Than Big Bird

“Oscar the Grouch, thank you for helping me learn as a small child that one can get in bad moods, and it’s not the end of the world,” wrote one New York Times reader in response to the news that the puppeteer behind Oscar and Big Bird is retiring after 50 years. One child psychologist “said that Oscar personified the jumble of strong feelings that children experience and must learn to sort out.”

Artist Who Nailed His Scrotum To Red Square Faces Ten Years In Prison For Setting Fire To Bank Of France

Last October, Pyotr Pavlensky was arrested for starting a fire at the entrance to the Bank of France building in Paris — in what he calls an artwork titled Lighting. He was only released from pretrial detention last month, but prosecutors are demanding that he be returned to jail until trial (to begin in January) and are calling for a ten-year sentence. Meanwhile, FEMEN members supporting Pavlensky have been demonstrating outside the courthouse, their mouths taped shut and messages scrawled in black across their bare breasts.

Artist-Endowed Foundations: Why They’re A Growing Force In Philanthropy, And Why They’re Different From Other Foundations

“While a rapidly emerging force in modern arts philanthropy, AEFs are markedly different from other institutional foundations. What’s more, there are different kinds of AEFs, and how these institutions operate is very much a work in progress. AEFs face unique and complex accounting, governance and management challenges that can stymie the best philanthropic intentions.”

Nico Muhly Explains How He Goes About Composing A Piece Of Music

“For me, every project has three clearly defined phases: the scheming and planning; the writing of actual notes; the editing. The planning process almost entirely excludes, by design, notes and rhythms. … I don’t want to play [the audience] a movie with a clear exposition, obvious climax and poignant conclusion, nor do I want to drop them blind into a bat cave of aggressively perplexing musical jabs … [and] mapping the piece’s route helps me avoid the temptation of the romantic journey or the provocateur’s dungeon.”

At Pompeii, Archaeologists Uncover New Room Of Beautifully Preserved Frescoes

The room is a lararium (household shrine), 16 feet by 12 feet, with an altar, a small raised pool, the remains of a garden, and brightly colored wall paintings that “include two serpents, a wild boar fighting unidentified creatures against a blood-red backdrop, and a mysterious man with the head of a dog that may have been inspired by the Egyptian god Anubis.”

New Evidence Changes Scholars’ Understanding Of The Eruption That Buried Pompeii

Until now, the consensus was that the fateful explosion of Mount Vesuvius happened on August 24, 79 CE — this notwithstanding the presence amid Pompeii’s ruins of warm-weather clothing and the remains of autumn fruit. Now excavators have uncovered graffiti with the date October 17. Archaeologist Kristina Killgrove explains why it’s almost certain that this graffiti is from just before the eruption and not a prior year, and why the particular date of the catastrophe matters.