Paying seven figures to buy a place in Manhattan or San Francisco might have always been dubious. But what’s the point of paying New York prices to live in a neighborhood that’s just biding its time to become “everywhere else”?
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The Immersive Technologies Transforming Theatre
“The industry is experimenting with so-called immersive technologies including: virtual reality, where participants put on a headset to enter a computer-generated world; motion capture, which enables an actor to control a digital avatar through their own movement in real time; and projection mapping, where scenery is projected on to a physical environment and can be changed in the blink of an eye.”
A Case That Mathematics Is The Most Beautiful Art
The modern separation among scholars between intellectual history and the history of mathematics is untenable as mathematics might be the ultimate intellectual endeavour. In the words of the 19th-century German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss: ‘mathematics is the queen of the sciences’; like literacy, widespread numeracy is one of the defining features of modernity. In fact, one of the great shifts of modernity has been how mathematicians changed their view of mathematics, transforming the focus of their work from the study of the natural world to the study of ideas and concepts.
The Power Of Relics: Why Humans Cannot Resist The Magical Potency Of Charismatic Objects
“Throughout history and in all cultural contexts – not just religious ones – people seem to spontaneously endow certain things with special powers, and to proclaim that contact with these persons and things, even by proxy, will have miraculous effects. … Why do humans so often ascribe special powers to things? One place to search for an answer is the cognitive processing that underlies the human understanding of force.”
How Immersive Theatre Is Creating Intimate Experiences
“We are simultaneously more connected than we ever have been and more disconnected. The way we communicate is through screens, which are essentially prosceniums” like the traditional stage that separates the actors from the audience, says Zach Morris. “When we seek culture, perhaps we want to be able to engage in it in a way that doesn’t have a membrane between us and it.”
Reviving Latin As A Spoken Language Is A Politically Fraught Project
“Latin’s revival, among young teachers on the one hand and nostalgic nationalists on the other, appears to flourish on two opposing ends. But while they may seem to be separate, the two are inexorably and uneasily linked through the history of white men’s appropriation of Latin as a marker of superiority.”
How Do You Make Music Accessible? This LA Phil Violinist Has Some Ideas
“It was our audiences in these spaces who would raise their hands and say ‘Well what was the composer feeling when they wrote that because I heard this.’ And then they would tell us a story or anecdote of their life that exactly reflected where the composer or where we as performers exactly were in our emotional life. So this was actually one of the most astute and emphatic and engaged audiences that we’d encountered in our lives.”
‘Dallas’ At 40: How The Trashiest, Campiest Show On Television Revolutionized Pop Culture, Rebooted Texas’s Reputation, And (Maybe) Helped Bring Down The Ceaușescus
“It’s hard, from the vantage point of our Peak TV era, to grasp why Dallas caused such a global ruckus. In 1980, the show was arguably the hottest pop culture entity in existence; about as many Americans tuned in to find out who shot J. R. as voted for president. … After more than 35 hours of interviews, we learned that the stories behind Dallas are nearly as over-the-top as the stories on the screen.”
In The Age Of The Museum Of Ice Cream And The Creation Museum, What Does ‘Museum’ Even Mean?
Philip Kennicott: “It isn’t easy coming up with a definition capacious enough to include the richness and diversity of the museum world without being so wide open that it might as well encompass theme parks and drinking holes that just happen to include the word ‘Museum’ in their name.”
Using Dance To Help Stroke Victims Recover
Ben Duke’s dance-theatre piece Stroke Odysseys, now touring Britain, puts five stroke survivors onstage, alongside dancers and musicians, to tell their stories — including how performing Duke’s specially-tailored choreography has improved their conditions.