Category: issues

“When I look on Tripadvisor to see whether I am going to be staying at Fawlty Towers or not, I consider most people are capable of spotting rats in the serving dishes. But I do not feel the same way about reactions to artistic endeavour. What I want when I read a book review is to find out what someone cleverer than me and better read than me thinks about whatever’s being reviewed.”

“As far as the writing goes, great generalists are great. But as a rule, generalist writing can produce some really freaky stories with freaky angles and freaky details, because the same person who writes about art has to write about opera and about comedy, and theater, and the holiday parade, and maybe, occasionally, that thing that newspapers call “nightlife.” No wonder nobody reads newspapers anymore.”

“State funding of the arts [could] be viewed as a form of ‘venture capital,’ encouraging investment in the British brand: The value of the artistic sector could be ‘leveraged’ to deliver economic growth.”

“This is an epidemic that now claims more lives per year than car accidents. It kills more people per year than guns. Drugs are now the No. 1 cause of deaths in emergency rooms. Yet there is zero government financing for research. There are no swanky benefits to raise funds to eradicate it.”

“Marcelino Arce, a youth baseball coach, described how some children in the Ironbound neighborhood had no idea the river was even there. Now, they must dodge traffic on the boulevard; but once across, he told me, it’s ‘a whole new world.'”

“Clearly, the quote in dispute, the second of these, is a fragment of the idea’s expression,” the judge wrote, adding: “Qualitative importance to society of a nine-word quote is not the same as qualitative importance to the originating work as a whole.”

Broadway’s August Wilson Theatre and the Metropolitan Opera House are among the venues that are installing “cushions developed by the British company NuBax. They are designed to tilt the pelvis forward and straighten the spine, increasing blood flow and, therefore, attention spans.”

“For decades, the tiny island nation nursed an international reputation of being serious, conservative, and – well, unsexy. In 2003, a survey found that Singaporeans had the least sex of people all the countries surveyed … But times are changing. With its military and economic stability relatively secured, Singapore’s sexual identity is blossoming in ways that are creative, compelling, and even risky.”

“The new model is astoundingly detailed, capturing subtle touches like the gray lines running through the venue’s main staircase.”