Play readings are, frankly, disappointing. “They’re like walking by a food truck and hearing your stomach rumble, but just when you get your wallet out the truck drives off. … It’s just people sitting there in chairs, sometimes walking up to an ugly music stand to read, and sometimes (woo-hoo!) sporadically engaging another actor at another stand. This is not inherently dramatically interesting.”
Blog
Why Language Struggles To Express Science
“In the twentieth century, some physicists, notably Robert Oppenheimer, worried that physics had reached a point of extreme alienation from popular language, and even from the language of other scientific disciplines. Intelligibility to non-physicists was becoming increasingly difficult, in some cases even impossible. Many physicists and science writers today seem more optimistic. While recognizing the distance between physics and ordinary language, they tend to believe that our language can be transformed to make the truths of physics available to a wide public audience.”
The Israel Philharmonic’s Biggest Change In Decades
“Founded by Hitler refugees in the 1930s and patronised by the café-dwellers of Tel Aviv, the orchestra has seen its audience grow old and its output stagnate. An influx of Russian musicians and concertgoers in the 1990s gave a brief blip of renewal but the IPO was set on a road to irrelevance. Young Israelis go to clubs, not concerts. Part of the problem has been the IPO’s resistance to change.”
Margaret Atwood On Why It Was A Bad Time For Ursula Le Guin To Leave
As an anarchist, she would have wanted a self-governing society, with gender and racial equality. She would have wanted respect for life-forms other than human. She would have wanted a child-friendly society, as opposed to one that imposes childbirth but does not care about the mothers or the actual children. Or so I surmise from her writing. But now Ursula K. Le Guin has died.
The Antidote To Fake News Is…?
We should be clear that when we lament the ‘fake news’ take over we are talking about media illiteracy, not actual fake news. Fake news was originally reported in our current public discourse to describe actual false information knowingly posted by bloggers in Macedonia who were gaming the system to get more clicks to make money from ads on their websites, as reported by Craig Silverman and Lawrence Alexander in Buzzfeed. Facts may be framed within a news story in interpretations that are biased. Fake news has come to be used to dismiss news that has a bias with which we disagree thanks to Trump’s co-opting of the term.
James MacMillan: Scottish National Party Is Using The Arts For Propaganda
The SNP is anxious to keep its “artsy stormtroopers onside” because of the threat posed by a resurgent Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn to its support in any future independence referendum campaign, he writes.
We’re Fascinated By Dystopias. But Why? They’re So Dull!
“We have seen a marked diminution in the production of new utopias over the last decades (along with an overwhelming increase in all manner of conceivable dystopias, most of which look monotonously alike).”
Old Vic Theatre Institutes New Program After Harassment Claims About Kevin Spacey
The programme comes after an internal investigation commissioned by the theatre led to 20 people making claims against Spacey.
Dissident Art After Fidel’s Cuba
In the past few months, several unofficial art spaces, both non-profit and commercial, have opened up across Havana. As the ruba’s Fidelegular influx of US collectors to the island has dried up under the Trump administration’s travel restrictions, artists have turned their attention to works and projects aimed at the local community.
Sex In The Middle Ages – There Was More Of It, And More Sophistication About It, Than You’d Think
Which is not to say that all the ideas they had about sex in medieval Europe were scientifically or medically sound, mind you. But they weren’t exactly prudes.