Tag: 05.17.19

Learning As Observation (First From Afar) And Then Focusing On What Can Be Known

“As the conversation of the physical phenomenon under discussion grows more complex, language is revealed to be inadequate to the task of describing abstract thought. At this point, students resort to drawing on the chalkboard to more clearly demonstrate their questions and hypotheses and the process of emendation continues in pictures. What this reveals is that scientific investigation is primarily a matter of imagination since the realities being investigated are frequently invisible and incompletely understood.” – American Enterprise Institute

Best-Selling Big-Idea Books Riddled With Errors – Should They Be Better Than Random Tweets?

“The time has come for those of us who work in book-length nonfiction to insist that professional fact-checking become as inalienable from publishing as publicity, marketing and jacket design — and at the publisher’s expense rather than as a cost passed on to the author, who, understandably, will often choose to spend her money on health care. In the age of tweets, it cannot be the fate of the book to become ever more tweetlike — maybe factual, maybe whatever. The book must stand apart, must stand above.” – The New York Times

Annette Benning Simply Will Not Tell You How She Gets To The Depths Of Her Characters

“She wished she could talk about it, she said in her barrel-aged voice. She likes to read actors’ interviews, scouring them for details of life and craft. … She wanted to be cooperative. She wanted to support the show. … Yet discussing how she prepared the role, how she plays it would mean intellectualizing it, distancing herself from it, violating something veiled, even sacred, at the core of what she does.” – The New York Times

A Brief History Of The Laugh Track — The Shame Of Sitcoms? Or The Sine Qua Non?

“TV and film star David Niven griped in 1955 that ‘the laugh track is the greatest single affront to public intelligence I know of.’ … But consider for a moment the unheralded achievements of the laugh track. It allowed directors to leave their live studio audiences behind and shoot scenes on location. It gave at-home viewers someone to laugh along with. And, if you believe the sparse scientific research and the anecdotal evidence from Hollywood, it made jokes funnier.” – Quartz

The ‘Gomorrah’ Housing Project In Naples Will Be Torn Down

“Just a few years ago, Le Vele – a sprawling housing estate in Scampia, on the outskirts of Naples – was both the fictional location for the hit crime film and Italian TV series Gomorrah and the real-life location for the biggest international drugs and arms supermarket in western Europe.” But no more. “Unusually, the effort to demolish the buildings has been led by the residents themselves.” – The Guardian

Mumbai’s Royal Opera House (Yes, It Has One), Restored To Splendor And Use As An Arts Venue

The theatre, completed in 1916, was built by British and Parsi businessmen and presented Western and Indian music and spoken theatre until the 1930s, when it became a cinema. The arrival of cable TV and VCRs killed its business, and it shut and went derelict until its owners, a former maharaja and maharani, had it restored in 2017. Once again, it hosts both Indian and Western classical music and dance as well as spoken theatre. – The Hindu BusinessLine (India)

Turning On Ourselves: Indictment Of Humanities In Higher Ed Can Be Ugly, Unfair

“It’s one thing to own the ugly feelings with which one is understandably and unjustly riddled after years of hanging on by the fingernails while applying for job after job, only to be ghosted by the search committees who pronounce judgment. But it’s quite another to wield those feelings as a weapon against people who are also marginalized.” – Chronicle of Higher Education