LA’s Hammer Museum Announces New $100K Artist Prize, With Winner Picked By Viewers

“The Hammer Museum announced on Wednesday a new $100,000 award” – called the Mohn Prize – “to a Los Angeles artist participating in its first biennial, “Made in L.A.” And, in a popular voting process familiar from reality TV, the winner will be chosen by people who see the exhibition, after a jury of art experts narrows the choice to five finalists.”

How Shakespeare Sounded In The Original (Now Online)

“The eminent Shakespearean scholar John Barton has suggested that Shakespeare’s accent would have sounded to modern ears like a cross between a contemporary Irish, Yorkshire and West Country accent. Others say that the speech of Elizabethans was much quicker than it is in modern day Shakespeare productions. Well, now you can judge for yourself.”

How Unfriendly! (Why We’re Unfriending People)

“Unfriending has become so rampant that the word was 2009’s word of the year in the Oxford Dictionary. Emotions run high around unfriending, too — especially now that there are apps that notify users when they’ve been dropped from someone else’s Facebook list. There have even been cases of people reacting violently in real life to a cyber unfriending.”