Blog

Katharine Whitehorn Was A Sharp-Eyed Columnist. She Wouldn’t Want To Continue Living Like This

Her sons say without doubt that if the real Katharine could see herself now she would be horrified, never having wanted to end up as she is. Indeed, most people find the prospect of this ending a negation of self, denial of a life’s work and character, a mortifying indignity no one should suffer. Who wants to leave family and friends with a final memory of themselves as a vegetable, a distortion, an alien being?

Kansas City Symphony Chief To Step Down

Frank Byrne spent 27 years with the U.S. Marine Band, initially as a tuba player and then executive assistant to the director and acting chief administrator before coming to the Kansas City Symphony as general manager in 2000. Then-Symphony board Chairwoman Shirley Helzberg asked him to take on the executive director role in 2002. Since then the Symphony’s budget has grown from $8 million to nearly $19 million. Last year the Symphony successfully completed a $55 million fundraising campaign to strengthen its endowment.

What Improv Does To Your Brain

“Does the brain of a comedy improv actor or freestyle rapper work in a particular way? Is it measurably different? Is it processing language (or sound) faster than a regular, lower-improvising brain? … We asked our pal Ari Daniel from our partner program NOVA to look into this. As it happens, he found a group of researchers and a group of professional improvisers working together on some of these questions.”

Tom Wolfe’s Notorious Critique Of The Architecture Profession Still Has A Point

“Wolfe was wrong to mock Modernism as purely utilitarian, and to let its worst abuses speak for the entire genre. … What Wolfe got right — and it’s a criticism that still rings true today — is his skewering of what can be an insular, snotty, tone-deaf culture, from the almost religious zealotry of the early days of Modernism to now.”

The Nobel Prize Lit Imbroglio That Has Us Questioning The Whole Enterprise

It is an understatement to say that the past months have been dramatic; they have in fact been outrageous, chaotic, and even, some would claim, disastrous — meaning that the Academy scandal has forever ruined Sweden’s reputation as a cultural lodestar. The drama has all the necessary ingredients: sex, abuse, power, money — and, of course, culture’s position in society.

How A Bearded, T-Shirted 38-Year-Old Is Remaking The Times Literary Supplement

“A fixture in England and on the Western world’s literary landscape, the TLS is a weekly book review journal with a reputation for being a bit dowdy — less progressive than The London Review of Books, a biweekly, and less agile than the books section of The Guardian, to name two of its competitors.” So where did they go to find an editor to shake things up? To The Sun, the British tabloid best known for its topless “Page 3 girls.” And in his two years there, Stig Abell really has changed the TLS, mostly for the better.

Big Data: The Six Basic Stories That Form The Basis For All Others

Professor Matthew Jockers at the University of Nebraska, and later researchers at the University of Vermont’s Computational Story Lab, analysed data from thousands of novels to reveal six basic story types – you could call them archetypes – that form the building blocks for more complex stories. The Vermont researchers describe the six story shapes behind more than 1700 English novels as: