The building “boasts a massive underground storage area holding 3.5 million volumes on 50-foot-high shelves. The collection is managed by robotic systems that help create an environment where scholars can scour the web for hours for academic papers and still get a hard-to-find volume from the stacks.”
Tag: 05.11.11
Can Creative Writing Programs Teach Creative Writing?
“The interest in slamming creative writing programs soars above the niceties of measured assessment and factual demonstration, catapulted there by deep-seated feelings about the nature of creativity, which we all love, and school, which we emphatically don’t, at least not in this context.”
Where Are The Great Recession’s Steinbecks?
“There are millions like me: people over 50, professional credentials (and achievements), working as ‘consultants’ and not earning a penny, living on savings, trying to re-train. … When you include us, the actual number of unemployed in America is closer to 20% than 9%. Now, that number is eye-popping. So why do writers and artists seem uninterested in the human toll of this terrifying downturn?”
Yale Announces Free Online Access To Museum, Library Image Collections
“Yale University officials announced yesterday that the school intends to be the first in the Ivy League to offer free online access to digital images of millions of objects housed in its museums, archives, and libraries.”
American Folk Art Museum Sells Building To MoMA
“The cash strapped Folk Art Museum will be able to eliminate its $31.9m bond debt and [New York’s Museum of Modern Art], which has first refusal on the sale, will be able to expand its exhibition space.”
Figuring Out Newt Gingrich Via His Amazon Customer Reviews
Between 2000 and 2008, Gingrich wrote 156 reviews of books he liked on Amazon.com. “If you read his entire collected Amazonian oeuvre, you can watch as an easily entertained quantum physics [and spy-thriller] junkie slowly realizes that he needs to get back into politics and set the rest of us straight – one last time.”
The Trials Of Lang Lang
“His first teacher humiliated him. ‘She fired me,’ says Lang Lang simply, ‘because she thought I had no talent.’ There were blazing rows with his father, who told him he was lazy. Unable to stand it, the boy smashed his hands against the wall. But then he found a teacher who gave him hope.”
China’s Security Tightens – Ai Weiwei An Example
“Encouraged and empowered by their success in delivering a smooth Olympic games, China’s security apparatus has steadily expanded. The budget for security is more than 50 per cent higher than it was during 2008, the year of the games, and has now even outstripped the budget of the People’s Liberation Army. Against this backdrop, Ai Weiwei is perhaps the party’s biggest scalp. While his protests have become steadily more electric over the past few years, few expected that any action would be taken against him.”
Allegations That Chilean Dictator Pinochet Had Poet Pablo Neruda Assassinated
“Manuel Araya, Neruda’s secretary, personal assistant and driver, has alleged in recent interviews that the poet was assassinated by the new military regime, which feared he would go into exile as a high-profile dissident.”
FCC Commissioner Quits To Become NBC-Comcast’s Chief Lobbyist (Of The FCC)
Meredith Attwell Baker resigned her post Wednesday as a Federal Communications Commission commissioner to become the top lobbyist for the merged Comcast-NBC, just four months after she approved the deal.