“Scientists have struggled to find universals that permanently link our species. Although we come to the table with biological predispositions, a million years of bending, breaking and blending have diversified our species’ preferences. We are the products not only of biological evolution but also of cultural evolution. Although the idea of universal beauty is appealing, it doesn’t capture the multiplicity of creation across place and time. Beauty is not genetically preordained.”
Blog
Do We Have Too Much Public Shame (Or Too Little)
“In recent decades, psychology research has found that feelings of shame can demoralize people or generate aggression because they make individuals feel bad about themselves. (This differentiates shame from guilt, which, because it focuses on a person’s acts rather than his or her character, can lead to apology and redress.) Today, public scholars like social work researcher Brené Brown continue to talk about these findings, urging those suffering from shame to throw the emotion aside and call their accusers to account – shaming the shamers, as it were.”
How Cities Develop Collective Moral Codes (And How Easily They Can Break Down)
“Cities are very unequal places. They are mixtures of very rich people and very poor people, very connected people and very disconnected people, people with a big inheritance and people that are utterly disinherited. The interesting question is why – despite extreme, structural, long-term, ongoing inequalities – these places cohere in some fashion. They cohere so long as a basic premise doesn’t get violated.” Michael Ignatieff talks with CityLab about how those premises arise.
Language As A Conveyor Of Culture And History
“With the historic complacency of having the leading world language for a mother tongue, we lag behind many other countries in translating. But numbers are not the only indicator. The ways English expression is changing reflect the flourishing throng of writers using it who are in one way or another not from England. This isn’t the start of something, but a development: there has been a marvellous chorale of voices from five continents for decades. New Englishes are instruments to make a new music.”
How Junot Díaz Got TV, Spider-Man, His Father, And America All Mixed Up Together
“I was five when my neighbor in Santo Domingo bought the first set on our street, the first I’d ever laid eyes on. … Maybe I would have been O.K. if I’d seen anything else: the news, a variety show, a political debate. But my earliest exposure to television was a Spider-Man cartoon … My father’s absence made perfect sense. He couldn’t come back right away because he was busy fighting crime in N.Y.C. . . . as Spider-Man. The diasporic imagination really is its own superpower.”
A Leonardo For Sale? Jerry Saltz Has Big Doubts
“Not only does it look like a dreamed-up version of a missing da Vinci, various X-ray techniques show scratches and gouges in the work, paint missing, a warping board, a beard here and gone, and other parts of the painting obviously brushed up and corrected to make this probable copy look more like an original.”
Milan Kundera’s Last Novel In Czech Published For First Time In Czech Republic
“Kundera, now 88 years old, left Communist Czechoslovakia in 1975 after he was dismissed from his teaching position and had seen his books banned. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting was published in French in 1979. Two years later it was released in Czech by a Canadian publisher – but it has never actually been published in Kundera’s homeland. It is reportedly hard even today to obtain in the Czech Republic.” That, at last, is about to change.
Revisiting Edith Hamilton, Who Introduced Generations To Classical Greece And Rome
“Although less well known in Europe, Hamilton achieved such popularity in the United States that, when I tell people that I study Classics, most people over the age of fifty who are familiar with the subject tell me that Hamilton was their entry point.” Now that her The Grrek Way (1930) and The Roman Way (1932) are being republished, Donna Zuckerberg considers how Hamilton’s view of the ancient world has, and hasn’t, held up over the decades.
David Lang’s New ‘Symphony For A Broken Orchestra’ (He Means That Title Literally)
The Pultizer-winning composer (The Little Match Girl Passion) has written the piece for 400 musicians, all playing damaged instruments from Philadelphia’s public school system. (The work was created as a one-time fundraiser – the money will be spent to repair the instruments and return them to Philly classrooms – but other school districts are already asking to perform the score.) Reporter Samantha Melamed checks out a rehearsal and talks to the composer about how to write music for instruments that are, by their natures (because they’re broken), unreliable.
The ‘Lion King’ Effect: How A Broadway Smash Changed South African Lives
“Over 20 years, hundreds of performers have joined the show in cities around the globe. These are some of their stories – laced with hope, tragedy, homesickness and triumph.”