“Understandably his sexier accomplishments, like painting the Mona Lisa and inventing the deep-sea diving suit, overshadowed his time as a wedding planner. But wedding plan he did – from approximately 1489 to 1493 – and like everything else da Vinci put his mind to, it was with gusto and moxie.”
Tag: 07.13.16
Will Live-Streaming News Break The Cable News Networks?
“What we saw last week was live streaming’s Gulf War, a moment that will catapult the technology into the center of the news — and will begin to inexorably alter much of television news as we know it. And that’s not a bad thing. Though it will shake up the economics of TV, live streaming is opening up a much more compelling way to watch the news.”
Neuroscientists And Philosophers Debate: Does The World Actually Exist?
Where philosophers have long debated how much we should trust our perception of the external world, neuroscientists operate on the assumption that we shouldn’t trust it much at all. According to neuroscience, it’s pretty much all in your head. Your world, through neuroscience’s empirical lens, is a construct you’ve built from patterns your brain has identified in sensory experiences.
If Writers Billed For Their Time And Had To Account For Their Hours…
Here’s what the ledger might look like. Christopher D. Legras investigates.
The 12th-Century Author-Composer-Herbalist-Sex Advisor-Abbess Who Fought The Patriarchy And Won
St. Hildegard of Bingen was even cooler than you knew.
Will America Finally Recognize This Woman As One Of Its Great Living Novelists?
“Many, many writers are chronically broke. Many have a long list of grievances with the publishing industry. Many will tell you about the circumstances that would have allowed them to enjoy the success of Ernest Hemingway or David Foster Wallace. Many have had multiple brushes with suicide, but there’s only one who wrote The Last Samurai and Lightning Rods, two of the finest novels published this century.”
The Sliding Value Of Facts In A Social Media-Saturated World
“We are caught in a series of confusing battles between opposing forces: between truth and falsehood, fact and rumour, kindness and cruelty; between the few and the many, the connected and the alienated; between the open platform of the web as its architects envisioned it and the gated enclosures of Facebook and other social networks; between an informed public and a misguided mob. What is common to these struggles – and what makes their resolution an urgent matter – is that they all involve the diminishing status of truth.”
Nico Muhly Is Ambivalent About Commissions And Deadlines (But *Loves* Cavafy)
“If I tell people I got a commission, they say ‘Congratulations!’ But a commission is almost like being challenged to a duel. … Or it feels like one of the tasks of Hercules. In this span of time, you have to solve this crazy problem which can be artistic or emotional or musical. … Deadlines are very odd. They’re these constantly shifting sources of anxiety. There’s no way to predict what they actually mean.” (audio)
‘The Hunger Games’ Foresaw The Meeting Of Reality TV And Politics
The titular games are themselves a reality TV show, after all, and (writes Alyssa Rosenberg) the franchise “feels uneasily resonant today not because [author of the books Suzanne] Collins treated reality programming as a diversion from more important things, but because she recognized the extent to which reality TV would capture our politics and become the means by which we make our most important decisions as a society.”
Little Old Lady Gives Possible Da Vinci Sketch To Expert For Authentication – And He Makes Off With It
“The drawing was given to the [octogenarian] by her father, an antiquarian in the center of Bordeaux, and had been in her possession for several years. … The supposed expert, with the sketch in tow, vanished quickly thereafter, but not before liquidating his company and leaving no trace of his whereabouts.”