“The percentage of people that read books, newspapers, or magazines in the bathroom, according to a survey by the plumbing-fixture company American Standard. … One Oregon resident realized the amount of time spent reading in the bathroom could be an interesting business opportunity.” And thus Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader was born.
Blog
Mark Oppenheimer Wrote A Dumb Story. Twitter Slammed Him. This Is A Problem.
“In the week to come, I received one of those public Twitter and Facebook shamings that writers now expect as an occupational hazard. Hundreds or possibly thousands of people, including close friends and professional colleagues, wrote or shared critiques of my piece; wondered in public what had become of me; lamented my decline (which had the strangely complimentary effect of suggesting that I had some status to lose, which few writers ever really feel they do).”
One Step Closer To Mind Reading? Scientists Use EEGs To Detect What A Person Is Seeing
“A crime happens, and there is a witness. Instead of a sketch artist drawing a portrait of the suspect based on verbal descriptions, the police hook the witness up to EEG equipment. The witness is asked to picture the perpetrator, and from the EEG data, a face appears. … Is it mind reading? Sort of.” And Canadian researchers are just beginning to make it a reality.
What If You Broaden Anne Frank’s Story As About Oppressed People Rather Than Jewish People?
The real Anne was unequivocal about the particular Jewishness of her suffering and about her perpetual otherness. She wrote, “We can never become just Netherlanders, or just English, or just . . . representatives of any other country for that matter, we will always remain Jews, but we want to, too.”
Meet One Of The All-Too-Rare Women Running A Major World Art Museum
“Laurence des Cars is an anomaly in the male-dominated world of French museums. Since March 2017, she has been running the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, with its envied collection of French 19th-century masterpieces, and the Musée de l’Orangerie across the river, for which Claude Monet produced a celebrated series of water lilies. Ms. des Cars was a strong contender for the job. To begin with, she was already partly doing it.”
In Buffalo: Debate About A Museum-As-Architectural-Treasure
Since Bunshaft’s addition opened in 1962, the art world has grown exponentially, diverging into a countless thematic streams and mediums, from monumental sculptures demanding monumental spaces to purely conceptual art requiring no space at all. The unpredictability of the art world and its growth into countless new disciplines demands a different kind of museum than Bunshaft or his contemporaries could have conceived. This uncertainty, coupled with a desire to reconnect with segments of the public long alienated from the art world, has driven expanding museums to favor vast public spaces and highly adaptable galleries over the more intimate spaces of the past.
RuPaul Said Trans Women Shouldn’t Be On ‘Drag Race’ – But They Should (And Have Been)
In comments to The Guardian that he later walked back, RuPaul said, “You can identify as a woman and say you’re transitioning, but it changes once you start changing your body. It takes on a different thing; it changes the whole concept of what we’re doing.” And he followed up on Twitter: “You can take performance-enhancing drugs and still be an athlete, just not in the Olympics.” Spencer Kornhaber offers a rebuttal.
A New Low? Casting Women In Tenor Roles Is Not Going To Fix Opera’s Gender Imbalance
Mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnston responds to an article arguing that we might soon be seeing female tenors on the opera stage: “‘Looser gender divisions in casting’ may well be possible in Shakespearean theatre, where speaking rather than singing voices are involved, but there are no female professional opera singers, even those of us who sing in the contralto range, begging to sing tenor roles such as Rodolfo (in Puccini’s La Bohème) or Alfredo (in Verdi’s La Traviata) at pitch.” (Or even transposed, for that matter.)
Broadway Fans Battle For The Chance To Be Volunteer Ushers
“Greet audience members, take tickets, work the concession stands, run the elevator. Point the way to seats, restrooms, box offices and exits. These are some of the tasks of a volunteer usher at theaters across New York City. The lure: a free ticket. The competition: increasingly fierce.”
How Vetters Screen The Fakes Out Of Tefaf
“This month, 189 of the world’s leading specialists in fine and decorative art – from Old Master paintings to 20th-century design – will gather to work their way through the objects in the fair. They are the final line of defence … on authenticity, provenance and condition.” Jane Morris meets some of the vetters and explains how they work. Says one, “We’re judging ‘beef on the hoof’.”