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Does The Perfect Sentence Exist?

What can celebrated writers teach the rest of us about the art of writing a great sentence? A common piece of writing advice is to make your sentences plain, unadorned and invisible. George Orwell gave this piece of advice its epigram: “Good prose is like a windowpane.” A reader should notice the words no more than someone looking through glass notices the glass. Except that you do notice the glass.

How Google Made Us Lazy

While it has fingers in many pies, its search function is the thing that changed everything. There is virtually no fact that we can’t find out in a heartbeat, thanks to its all powerful engines. It is, of course, a double-edged sword since it killed lively pub debates. Virtually every disputed topic is now resolveable in the length of time it takes to take out a smart phone.

Opera Philadelphia’s Unconventional Festival Wins Best With Conventional

So “none of this old tired stuff done in the same way” could really be the festival’s motto. But this year’s installment, O18, which began on Thursday and runs through Sunday, is most successful when it’s most traditional. Two of the four shows I saw over the weekend were proscenium productions with orchestras in the pit: opera as you imagine it. These were far more satisfying than the pair of out-of-the-box entries.

Why Public Square Debates Need To Be Unruly

For Habermas, the function of public debate is not to find a reasonable common ground. Rather, the public sphere ‘is a warning system’, a set of ‘sensors’ that detect the new needs floating underneath the surface of a supposed political consensus. And if we worry too much about civility and the reasonable middle, we risk limiting the ability of the public sphere to detect new political claims. To get those claims on the agenda in the first place often requires uncivil and confrontational political tactics.

How Copyright Laws Have Shaped Theatre

One of the things that copyright law allows some courts to do in the nineteenth century is to essentially exert control over what gets put onstage, because in theory, if you say this has no copyright, you’re saying an author can’t realize any value from it, economic value from it, because you can’t monopolize it. In fact, if you say, you don’t have any right to prevent other people from doing it, things that one might want to censor, for example, the display of partially nude women onstage, which is one case I discuss, tends to proliferate rather than to disappear.

Max Hollein’s Plans For The Met Museum

Coming to the Met at a time when nearly every aspect of the universal museum is coming into ethical question, Hollein has to confront daunting challenges including the re-evaluation of the colonial era, the advent of transformative technology, the changing nature of modern information consumption, the fusion of contemporary art with global capital, and the foregrounding of issues of identity in the cultural agora. It’s a sign of the times that the most frequently heard knock against the well-liked Hollein is that he is a white European male.