Category: today’s top story

“Anyone who spends any time at the Opera House and here on the forecourt is aware of the multiple incidents that happen here on a daily basis,” Opera House CEO Richard Evans said. “There have been 200 reported incidents, many of which have necessitated ambulances coming … many of these people are tourists, and then ended up getting flown home. It’s really not a great situation.”

In anticipation of Robert Lepage’s 45-ton “Ring” set, the Metropolitan Opera “had a steel company install three 65-foot girders under the stage, a feat of delicate engineering involving thousands of pounds of steel that counts as a permanent structural change to the opera house, the most extensive work yet to prepare for a new production there.”

“The case for digitally-driven stupidity assumes we’ll fail to integrate digital freedoms into society as well as we integrated literacy. This assumption in turn rests on three beliefs: that the recent past was a glorious and irreplaceable high-water mark of intellectual attainment; that the present is only characterized by the silly stuff and not by the noble experiments; and that this generation of young people will fail to invent cultural norms that do for the Internet’s abundance what the intellectuals of the 17th century did for print culture. There are likewise three reasons to think that the Internet will fuel the intellectual achievements of 21st-century society.”

Nicholas Carr “insists that the negative side effects of the Internet outweigh its efficiencies. Consider, for instance, the search engine, which Carr believes has fragmented our knowledge. “We don’t see the forest when we search the Web,” he writes. “We don’t even see the trees. We see twigs and leaves.”

“The idea that the brain is a kind of zero sum game — that the ability to read incoming text messages is somehow diminishing our ability to read Moby Dick — is not altogether self-evident. Why can’t the mind simply become better at a whole variety of intellectual tasks?” The author of “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains” “says it really has to do with practice.”

“A new annual playwriting award, providing $50,000 to an emerging writer and an additional $100,000 toward the production costs for mounting the recipient’s play, has been established by the foundation of Arthur Laurents, the Tony Award-winning Broadway director, playwright and librettist, and Tom Hatcher, his partner.”

“As homey as a bookstore or local library branch might feel to you or me, they can make other people feel insecure, out-of-place and clueless. This is, of course, assuming that poor families have bookstores and libraries in their neighborhoods, and that it’s safe and easy for a child to walk to them alone.”

“Spain is responsible for an estimated 20% of worldwide downloads, securing it the dubious distinction of [being] one of the top pirating havens in the world. But until now, the industry has been hard-pressed to quantify the losses.” Illegal downloading of music, film and video games is huge, e-book piracy less so.

“Aired last month, MTV’s True Life – Resist the Power, Saudi Arabia followed how three Saudi youths and a heavy metal band cope with the strictures they encounter in their daily life in Jeddah, seen as the kingdom’s most liberal city.” Now the country’s sharia court system has launched a case against the three. The crime: “openly declaring sin.”

“An engineering report by theatre consultants Marshall Day Entertech warned of ‘multiple fatalities’ in the event of a serious malfunction” of stage machinery. “Sydney’s Daily Telegraph reported the Opera House would be forced to close unless repairs worth $800 million were done. But the NSW government yesterday played down the risks and the cost of work.”