“Scientists who decode the genetic history of humans by tracking how genes mutate have applied the same technique to one of the Western world’s most ancient and celebrated texts to uncover the date it was first written.”
Tag: 02.26.13
Coming To Grips With Louis Kahn
“Kahn, a conjuror of strange, monumental forms that have the gravity of ancient ruins, was one of the most influential architects of the 20th century – yet, even after that film, he is still one of the least known.” Why?” Says one architectural historian, “His strange, quasi-religious utterances were all rather irritating to me and my generation.”
Movies And The Propaganda They Make
“While it is true that propaganda is no longer a straightforwardly top-down process, the root of the word – to propagate, or to grow – still usefully describes how cinema plays a central role in the reiteration and reinforcement of particular ways of seeing and thinking, and how this, in turn, has strong political consequences.”
Huge Cache Of Palestinian Books Sits In Israel’s National Library
“[As] the battle over the creation of the Jewish state raged, teams of Israeli librarians and soldiers were collecting tens of thousands of books from Palestinian homes in Jerusalem, Haifa, Jaffa and elsewhere … For Israel, the effort was a way to preserve books which would eventually be returned to their owners.” Yet the books remain, even today, in the stacks in Jerusalem.
Turkish Cinema Explores Its Own Wild West
“[There’s a] growing crop of film-makers drawn towards the country’s spectacular rural interior, which is starting to take a place as central to Turkish cinema as the American west once was to Hollywood.”
Revisiting (In Color!) The Operas Of The Cultural Revolution
Zhang Yaxin “was a photographer for Xinhua News Agency when he was chosen by Jiang Qing, the wife of Chairman Mao Zedong, to photograph the performances of the model operas she developed after the Communist Party leaders banned traditional Peking opera for being too bourgeois.” And he was one of the few people besides Jiang Qing in all of China to have access to color film.
Hollywood’s Visual Effects Crisis
“In a business where effects-laden movies helped Hollywood make a record-setting $10.8 billion last year, many of the studios that create those effects are barely staying afloat.”
Fake Authenticity – What Truth Matters
“The modern obsession with authenticity can be deceptive; it can make a narrative sound superficially plausible even when it’s deeply false to its moment. The stakes are higher when dramas render actual events.”
Why Bach Went Blind?
“More than two-and-a-half centuries after the fact, a prominent Finnish ophthalmologist is offering what he calls a “plausible diagnosis” of the great composer: intractable secondary glaucoma, brought on by a botched eye operation.”
Why We Find It Hard To Resist A Dance Craze
“While many dance crazes are undoubtedly silly, they are also arguably irresistible. Additionally, dance fads may be understood as challenging, or representing, the angst of an age.”