Certainly thinkers were always concerned with what is true, but the word “fact” didn’t come into common use until the 1660s. David Wootton gives us the story, from how the likes of Kepler and Galileo paved the way for the concept to take hold to Hume’s definition of facts (as distinct from “necessary truths”) to how facts changed the idea of authority.
Tag: 02.13.17
When Leonid Massine And Sergei Prokofiev Tried To Get Their Ballet Past Soviet Apparatchiks And Into The Bolshoi
Prokofiev in particular had hoped to turn Le Pas d’acier (The Dance of Steel) from the quasi-folkloric confection Diaghilev had made of it into a real socialist work of art. Didn’t work. It wasn’t pretty. In an excerpt from Bolshoi Confidential, Simon Morrison tells the head-shaking story.
Producer Complains About NYT Review Of “Big River” After She Criticizes Mark Twain
Producer Jack Viertel: “Mark Twain does not go in and out of style. Whatever one thinks of the specific success or failure of Big River’s efforts to translate The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to the stage, it is faithful to Twain. I’m stunned to read, for instance, that Ms. Collins-Hughes is upset about the character of Jim being the only important black character in the piece.”
Remember Second Life? It’s Still Here, And It’s A Haven For The Disabled
“Unlike traditional gaming, Second Life is governed by few rules. Residents can customize their avatars in an infinite number of ways. They can fly and teleport as easily as they can walk, run, and jump. They can build bespoke homes and islands almost from scratch, … marry a Second Life lover, take a rocket to the moon, or simply tuck themselves into bed at night. For many disabled residents, who may spend 12 hours a day or more in Second Life, the most important moments and relationships of their lives happen inside the virtual world.”
Soviet Ballet Was Legendary. But Navigating The Politics? Brutal!
“The daunting auditions of Soviet legend—teachers scrutinizing preadolescents for the slightest physical imperfection—found an ideological parallel in the required inspections by censorship boards at the Bolshoi and the Mariinsky–Kirov theaters.”
The Gay Black Baritone Who’s Married To A Rabbi And Sings In Yiddish
Meet Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell.
How A Grass-Roots Movement Convinced Equity To Get Major Raises For Off-Broadway Actors
Diep Tran tells the story of #FairWageOnstage.
This Country Banned A Film Because Morgan Freeman Wasn’t In It
The producers of the Uzbek film Daydi (“Rogue”) put Freeman top and center in the poster, but the movie doesn’t feature him (or even, evidently, anyone who looks like him). So Uzbekistan’s film board denied a license to show it.
How Do You Treat A Mass Shooting Onstage?
There are three new plays in New York dealing with the Sandy Hook school massacre. Alexis Soloski and Erik Piepenburg speak with the playwrights about how they depict gun violence in their scripts.
Fake News In Historical Context (We’ve Dealt With This Before)
“The production of fake, semi-false, and true but compromising snippets of news reached a peak in eighteenth-century London, when newspapers began to circulate among a broad public. In 1788, London had ten dailies, eight tri-weeklies, and nine weekly newspapers, and their stories usually consisted of only a paragraph. “Paragraph men” picked up gossip in coffee houses, scribbled a few sentences on a scrap of paper, and turned in the text to printer-publishers, who often set it in the next available space of a column of type on a composing stone. Some paragraph men received payment; some contented themselves with manipulating public opinion for or against a public figure, a play, or a book.”