“Twenty years ago we published a magazine that looked ahead to London in 2010. Our team of experts foresaw futuristic monorails, machines to control the rain, and a city riven by class wars. Instead we have the London Eye, the Gherkin and a population in thrall to the iPod and the mobile phone. We went back to those experts to ask: how did we get here?”
Tag: 01.24.10
Anish Kapoor To Build 400-Foot Tower For London Olympics
“The sculpture, to be built in the Olympic park, is to be funded by Lakshmi Mittal, the steel magnate and Britain’s richest man. Although the exact design is being kept secret, the asymmetric steel structure is understood to resemble a cluster of interlocking fractured rings.”
Martin Amis Starts Another Argument
“Now 60, Amis has picked a fight with the grey power of Britain’s ageing population, calling for euthanasia ‘booths’ on street corners where they can terminate their lives with ‘a martini and a medal’.” (As it happens, Amis has a new book to publicize.)
To Solve Leonardo Mystery, Scientists Want To Dig Him Up
“A team from Italy’s National Committee for Cultural Heritage, a leading association of scientists and art historians, has asked to open the tomb in which the Renaissance painter and polymath is believed to lie” in order to “rebuild Leonardo’s face and compare it with the Mona Lisa.”
A Decade’s Worth Of Déjà Vu: 1980s Return At The Movies
“The children who grew up watching the big, pre-irony 1980s movies — where all was black and white, good was good and evil was evil, before Tarantino and Soderbergh came and blurred all the lines — are now the directors and studio bosses, and they’re making the movies they used to watch.”
Why Don’t Book Reviewers Ever Cop To Boredom?
“[F]ew experiences carry more risk of active boredom than picking up a book. … A library is an enormous repository of information, entertainment, the best that has been thought and said. It is also probably the densest concentration of potential boredom on earth.”
On A Shoestring, Making Good Architecture For The Poor
“Narrow Gate architects design only for low-income people. Their latest and biggest achievement is Dudley Village,” in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood. “Nothing about this architecture says ‘affordable.’ It isn’t at the cutting edge of design, but it is handsome background architecture.”
Some Readers Just Want To Be Alone
“Reading with a group can feed your passion for a book, or help you understand it better. … There is a different class of reader, though. They feel that their relationship with a book, its characters and the author is too intimate to share. ‘The pursuit of reading,’ Virginia Woolf wrote, ‘is carried on by private people.'”
Why Is The Cleveland Museum’s Exhibition Schedule So Weak?
“The simplest explanation is that the museum has lacked space during construction of a $350 million expansion and renovation designed by Rafael Vinoly, which started in 2005. The museum has also suffered from high turnover among directors.”
Charleston Newspaper Enlists Syracuse Arts Journalism Students For Spoleto Coverage
“The students will expand The Post and Courier’s “Spoleto Today” staff by writing for print editions and producing online pieces to include video and audio components. They also will communicate with festival audiences through social media, including Twitter and Facebook, during the May 28-June 13 festival.”