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Seeing ‘The Tiger In The Grass’: The Case For ‘Applied History’

The idea that historians could use their knowledge of the past to advise useful courses of action for the future goes all the way back to Thucydides. “In recent decades, however, things have changed. The longstanding view of the historian as being, in modern jargon, ‘policy-relevant’, has fallen out of favour and often arouses suspicion” – within the discipline as well as outside it. Robert Crowcroft makes the case for a widespread revival of the approach now called “applied history.”

Morality, International Politics, And Contemporary Classical: A Censorship Controversy At Germany’s Top New Music Festival

This spring, composer Wieland Hoban pitched the third in a series of pieces addressing the 2008-09 Israel-Gaza war to the Donaueschinger Musiktage. Last month, artistic director Björn Gottstein responded that he would allow no piece critical of Israel to be performed at the festival. Hoban went public, and the new music community in Germany (and beyond) has been arguing ever since.

Is This The Worst Novel Ever Written?

“If there is a Pride and Prejudice of kitschy bad fiction, Amanda McKittrick Ros’s 1897 masterpiece of overwriting” — Irene Iddesleigh — “is it. The book’s legion of avowed ‘admirers’ includes Mark Twain, the Bloomsbury Group, Aldous Huxley and C.S. Lewis. At parties, ardent devotees have been known to compete in seeing how long they can read aloud from its pages without laughing. The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature aptly sums up Ros’s work as ‘uniquely dreadful.'”

How Playwrights Deal With Productions That Muck With The Text

“Rajiv Joseph recalls the advice delivered in a class taught by none other than Edward Albee: ‘Be as explicit with instructions for delivering lines as possible.’ But at that point in his career, Mr. Joseph didn’t completely buy in to the opinion of a playwright known for exerting extreme authorial control. … His experience with Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo led him to think twice about Albee’s warning.” Journalist Stuart Miller talks with Joseph, Lynn Nottage, David Henry Hwang, Sarah Ruhl, David Lindsay-Abaire, and Lucy Thurber about how they deal with stagings they weren’t involved with that go places they didn’t intend.

Neil Simon, Called The World’s Most Popular Playwright After Shakespeare, Dead At 91

“Time magazine proclaimed him the ‘patron saint of laughter’” His shows, with an arsenal of sarcastic wit, became highly entertaining staples of high school and community theaters, and they popped up on stages as far away as Beijing and Moscow. But mostly, he dominated Broadway like no other playwright of the past half-century. Hardly a year passed from 1961 to 1993 without a new production by Mr. Simon, whose legacy was a colossally successful run of comedies and comic dramas on topics such as romance, adultery, divorce, sibling rivalry, cancer and the fear of aging.”

Brussels Bureaucrats Block Bruegel Museum

“Bruegel House, a dedicated museum to his life and work, was due to have opened in October 2019, the centrepiece of the 450th anniversary of his death. But a strict financial rule to guard against over-spending has led to the project being put on hold, despite no money being required from Belgium’s federal government.”

How A Mathematician Turned Game Theory, Myths And Comic-Book Drawings Into A Massively Popular Card Game

“‘The question is,’ Richard Garfield once asked, ‘can systems be dramatic? Can math be breathtaking? Can numbers move your soul?'” In 1991, Garfield (the great-great-grandson of President James Garfield) walked into the offices of a Seattle game publisher with a proposal that ultimately morphed into Magic: The Gathering – the first-ever trading-card game, which, over 25 years, has acquired roughly 20 million players and 20 billion cards printed, some of which are now worth tens of thousands of dollars. Magic, writes Chris Randle, “balances chess’s chilly purity with the social theatre of poker.”

Cathedral Gets Pushback For Showing ‘Wicker Man’ In Movie Series

The autumn film series at Derby Cathedral in the English Midlands includes The Wicker Man (which features female nudity and a pagan sacrifice), Don’t Look Now (sex and seances), and The Life of Brian (the Gospels get the Monty Python treatment). Says one church warden from the diocese, “I just think it isn’t appropriate to show these films in a place of worship that is consecrated and hallowed.” Responds the Cathedral’s dean, “The first thing we’re trying to do is open the cathedral to new people. It doesn’t just belong to the people who go to church; it certainly doesn’t belong to me.”

Lindsay Kemp, 80, Groundbreaking Dancer-Choreographer-Mime-Performance Artist

While he’s most famous for having taught the singers Kate Bush and David Bowie (He helped invent and coached Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust persona), Kemp founded his own contemporary dance company in the 1960s and created flamboyant, pioneering stage productions that combined – and ignored any boundaries between – dance, mime, musical and spoken-word theatre.