“‘We all came to the show from different places wanting to be in the entertainment industry, but also being trivia nerds, so we’ve been lucky enough that this merges those two things.’ Jeopardy! head writer Billy Wisse … walked us through the question-making process from start to finish.”
Blog
German Researchers: We Can Now Compose Music Using Only The Brain
“Twenty years ago, the idea of composing a piece of music using the power of the mind was unimaginable,” said Gernot Müller-Putz of the Graz University of Technology, a co-author of the study. “Now, we can do it.”
How Caravaggio’s Life Of Crime Changed His Art
Last week, Noah Charney wrote about how the great painter became a violent, impulsive train wreck. This week, he tells us how much worse Caravaggio got – for instance, he fled to Malta for sanctuary and the Knights welcomed him; the next year, they called him a “putrid and fetid member” of the order and threw him in jail – and how the fact that he was constantly fleeing the authorities affected the way he painted.
Peter Hall, A Director Who Animated Language
“Directors can’t simply let a play speak on its own, but they must put their ear to the ground. Meaning for Hall always returned to an intimate confrontation with the line. He didn’t believe that Shakespeare could be properly done without respecting the forms in which he wrote his plays. Verse, diction, rhetorical patterns — attention to these matters is what allowed a play to live again.”
The Creative Force That Was Peter Hall
Michael Billington: “What I most admired about Hall at the National was his tenacity in withstanding industrial action, persistent attacks from disappointed members of the Olivier regime and media abuse.”
Director Peter Hall, 86
Hall’s most startling and lasting achievement is to have been the founding father of the UK’s two biggest subsidised theatres in the form that we now know them: the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Get A First Look Inside A Newly-Opened 3,500-Year-Old Egyptian Tomb
“Discovered at the Dra Abul Naga necropolis on the west bank of the Nile [near Luxor], the newly opened tomb holds statuettes, mummies, pottery, and other artifacts … One of the statues depicts a goldsmith named Amenemhat sitting beside his wife. A figure of one of their sons stands beneath them. The archaeologists say the family lived during Egypt’s 18th Dynasty.” (includes video)
Ian Buruma Talks About Launching A New Era At The New York Review Of Books
“Some shoes are harder to fill than others. Robert Silvers .. ran the left-leaning intellectual magazine with single-minded fervor from the time he co-founded it in 1963 until he died at 87 in March. His shoes may as well be Shaquille O’Neal’s.” But Buruma is up for the challenge, and, as he tells John Williams, he’ll do his job differently: “It was a monarchy, and I think perhaps it will be a slightly more democratic operation. Certainly I think I’ll be more collaborative.”
A Total Of 864 People Will Be Able To See Punchdrunk’s New Production – Is That A Bad Thing?
Lyn Gardner: “Access is always going to be a problem with small-capacity or small-scale shows. But does that mean we should ban artists from making shows that involve an intimacy of experience or one-on-one work because very few can get to see it? It would be odd if in the quest for access we started asking artists to censor the kind of work they might dream of and make.”
Did Someone Really Just Figure Out How To Read The Mysterious Voynich Manuscript?
Last week, researcher Nicholas Gibbs announced in the Times Literary Supplement that he had cracked the medieval text’s long-uindecipherable code. (He says it’s a women’s health manual.) But other experts in the field aren’t convinced. Here Brigit Katz gives us some of the other (weird) theories about the Voynich and the six basic things to know about it.