“Too often products made for people with different physical, cognitive and sensory abilities have been ugly, feebly designed and stigmatizing. They’ve been developed not by designers but by engineers. And engineers haven’t always taken their cues from people who have disabilities, the ones who know best what they need and want.
Blog
A Japanese Way Of Thinking About Space
“Instead of framing space as a relationship between objects and walls, the Japanese concept of space is about the relationships among people. By shifting this view, we can discover an interesting way of thinking about the spaces we make and use in everyday life—and the relationships that they create.”
Why Equal Pay Battles Are So Difficult In Hollywood
“It’s true that individual Hollywood stars have more power than the average woman who finds out that she’s being underpaid. They can go public, knowing their stories will count as news and that they have fans who will rally to them. But the storm of coverage conceals an uncomfortable truth: For all their fame, women in the entertainment industry may have a harder time securing long-term pay equity than their counterparts in less glamorous industries.”
Appreciating Ursula Le Guin
She took everything that might have hindered a lesser spirit and made it into a strength. As part of the New Wave in science fiction in the 1960s and ’70s, she and writers like Samuel R. Delany, J. G. Ballard, and Philip K. Dick brought sophisticated prose style and contemporary political and sexual questions into a genre that had often felt artless and blunt.
When The Parthenon Was A Riot Of Color
There are plenty of people now who find the notion of painted marble or bronze an affront to their impression of the past as an austere, unadorned place. Yet ancient art would have been a riot of colour and glitzy decoration.
Opera About Tabasco Sauce (From 1894!) Revived In New Orleans
Tabasco: a Burlesque Opera, composed by George Whitefield Chadwick, was the most popular American opera of the late 19th century: it toured to almost 50 cities before Chadwick pulled it because he wasn’t getting royalties. Now New Orleans Opera is reviving this tale of the original Louisiana hot sauce for the city’s 300th anniversary and the company’s 75th.
Orientalism And The Depiction Of Arabs In America
To Arabs, whose experience of imperialism and colonialism is brutal and direct, talking about their land as delectable bits of food, sweets to be consumed, can feel like more than mere caricature. It’s the way that the West has perceived the lands of the Middle East—something for our consumption. “It’s our oil, after all. It’s our Holy Land, after all.”
‘Duplitecture’ – How The Chinese Are Using And Adapting Their Towns That Replicate European Cities
Bianca Bosker: “I’ve spent the past decade tracing China’s ‘duplitecture’ – the replica White Houses, Versailles Palaces, and even foreign cities, from Venice to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, that have multiplied through the country – and from the start of my research, planners and architecture critics have assured me the movement was on its last legs.” Turns out, ten years on, that just isn’t so.
An Experiment: Why Swearing Helps Ease Pain
It turned out that, when they were swearing, the intrepid volunteers could keep their hands in the water nearly 50 percent longer as when they used their non-cursing, table-based adjectives. Not only that, while they were swearing the volunteers’ heart rates went up and their perception of pain went down. In other words, the volunteers experienced less pain while swearing. It’s an easy experiment to try for yourself at home, or at a party if you have the right kind of friends.
Enjoying The Fleeting Nature Of Theater, In The Wake Of Cancer
Playwright Dan O’Brien: “When you or a loved one are gravely ill you can’t help but feel that now is undeniably, inescapably now. … When one is gravely ill, anything can happen, and sometimes does. In a play, anything can and always does happen. Must do. Every moment a potential calamity. We’ve all seen an actor go up on her lines. Disaster. Beautiful. You can hear a pin drop.”