Daniel Mendelsohn: “While our forebears looked confidently to the text of the Aeneid for answers, today it raises troubling questions. … Two thousand years after its appearance, we still can’t decide if [Virgil’s] masterpiece is a regressive celebration of power as a means of political domination or a craftily coded critique of imperial ideology — a work that still has something useful to tell us.”
Blog
Blame Editors For The Quality Of This Year’s Man Booker Finalists?
Kwame Anthony Appiah, chair of the judges, implicitly blamed editors for the poor quality of some of this year’s submissions while announcing the 2018 shortlist: “We occasionally felt that inside the book we read was a better one, sometimes a thinner one, wildly signalling to be let out.” Fellow judge Val McDermid went further by suggesting modern editors don’t know what they’re doing. “I think,” she said, “young editors coming through are not necessarily getting the kind of training and experience-building apprenticeship that happened when I was starting out.”
Composer Unsuk Chin Wins $200K Kravis Prize And New York Philharmonic Commission
The Berlin-based Korean composer, who has already had three major works performed by the Philharmonic, receives the biennial award just a week after the orchestra premiered the previous prizewinner’s commission — Louis Andriessen’s Agamemnon.
Netflix Doesn’t Get Much Criticism. Should It?
Over the last few years, there has been a rising fear of giant tech companies such as Facebook, Twitter and the Google-owned YouTube, for a whole host of reasons. The fear often boils down to this: These companies host problematic content and then have algorithms to push that to an unprecedentedly large audience. Although it’s not often thought of in the same way, Netflix has a similar model and scale.
William Forsythe Explains, So That Anyone Can Get It, How Abstract Choreography Presents Narrative
“He illustrates this idea by knotting his hands and pulling up his fingers very rapidly in turn; it took him 15 years to master this movement, he says with a grin, but you couldn’t watch it for 15 minutes without falling asleep. ‘Why? Because no more information is coming out. It doesn’t matter how much effort I’ve made. But if I go like this’ – he sticks out one finger mid-twiddle and holds it aloft – ‘you snap to attention. Your brain goes ‘Oh … anomaly or trend?’ That is the beginning of narrative.'”
The Kids’ Fantasy Epic Based On Sartrean Existentialism (Really)
Lloyd Alexander, author of the five-volume series The Chronicles of Prydain, was deeply influenced by Sartre; indeed, he was the first to translate Nausea into English. “Despite Alexander’s remarkable role in the history of existentialism, oddly no one has made any connection between that philosophy and his own work” — until Jesse Schotter, here.
Advertisers Rush To Co-Opt Banksy’s Shredded Painting
“This week, Banksy must surely be wondering if he has fueled the very machine of late-stage capitalism that he famously despises. … Two McDonald’s agencies had gotten in front of the meme by turning Banksy’s half-shredded image into an ode to french fries, but lots more homages have surfaced since then.”
Writing Down Choreography: How Dance Notation Works
Reporter Marcie Sillman talks with a Labanotation expert on how she recorded a ten-minute contemporary duet and with dance historian Doug Fullington on using 19th-century Stepanov and Justement notation to reconstruct Giselle. (text and audio)
How The Writers Of ‘Better Call Saul’ Morphed Well-Meaning Lawyer Jimmy McGill Into Slimy Saul Goodman
“Multiple ideas were pitched, but only one seemed to believably get Jimmy out of the jam they had written him into while also shoving him toward his shyster destiny. Here, in interviews with [co-showrunner Peter] Gould and the episode’s writer, Gordon Smith, we dug into how the writers solved that challenge and where it left our favorite ambulance-chaser.” (video)
More Than 1,000 Protesters Disrupt Projection Of Ads Onto Sydney Opera House
With chants like “Save our sails” and “Our house is not for sale,” the crowd booed and jeered at the promotional images for a horse race that were projected onto the steep white roofs of the building. Some protesters even aimed lights at the Opera House in order to mar the display.