Under a congressional resolution, 2010 would be the Year of the Bible. “The problem is not praising the Bible, it’s giving official recognition to it and not other sacred texts. Ironically, by pushing this notion, its advocates run the risk of diminishing the stature of the Bible.”
Tag: 05.28.09
AMA’s Anti-Smoking Campaign Puts Hollywood On Notice
“The advocacy arm of the American Medical Association unveiled a summer-long campaign on Wednesday intended to publicly shame movie studios for depicting images of smoking in their mass-appeal movies. ‘Which Movie Studios Will Cause the Most Youth to Start Smoking This Summer?’ is the name of the effort. … The studio found to be the biggest offender will be named on billboards in September.”
Imperiled Film-Makers’ Coop Finds Home; Rent: $1 A Year
“After months of uncertainty, the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, whose future was threatened early this year when it received an order of eviction from a city-owned building in TriBeCa, has found a new home, and on terms that are likely to make it the envy of other arts organizations and tenants across the city.” Its new landlord is a developer/film aficionado.
Oregon Ballet Theatre Threatened With Closure
“[The company] has become the first of Portland’s major arts groups pushed to the wall by the global recession. Unless [it] raises $750,000 by June 30 to cover expenses and pay creditors, it may have to close its doors.”
Darwinism: Let’s (Not) Get Personal
“No respectable historian would claim that if Newton had never been born we would still be ignorant about gravitation. Yet we still refer to the regularities of the behavior of physical bodies as ‘Newton’s Laws,’ the general regularities of simple inheritance as ‘Mendelism,’ and the science of biological evolution as ‘Darwinism.'”
The Remarkable Madame De Staël
“She wrote among much else one celebrated novel … She personally saved at least a dozen people from the French revolutionary guillotine. She reinvented Parisian millinery with her astonishing multicolored turbans. She dramatically dismissed Jane Austen as ‘vulgaire.’ She snubbed Napoleon at a reception. … And she once completely outtalked the poet Coleridge at a soirée in Mayfair. For these things alone she should be remembered.”