“Footloose” Revisited: Can Dance Lessons Save The Day?

“Just hours after a welcome-to-school dance at Aliso Niguel High School in Aliso Viejo, Principal Charles Salter banned all future dances for this academic year. The frustrated Salter had been sending out warnings for several years. In a recent phone call, he boiled down his complaints to three factors: inappropriate clothing (or too little clothing), especially among the girls; students who had been drinking alcohol; and ‘freaking’ – dancing that was way too raunchy and sexually suggestive.” Laura Bleiberg has a suggestion for rescinding the ban – and it involves (gulp) learning.

Advertisers – Ready To Fake You Out

“Companies are increasingly turning to so-called ‘word-of-mouth’ advertising, in which products are hawked-sometimes by paid salespeople, sometimes just by volunteers-in ostensibly innocent everyday social interactions rather than traditional print ads or TV spots. In 2002, in a particularly controversial instance, Sony Ericsson dispatched 60 actors to tourist attractions to pose as sightseers and ask people to take their picture with a new camera phone before going on to extol its virtues-all without disclosing their connection to the company.”

TV Away From The TV

“For the first time, tube fans this fall will be able to keep up with most of prime time without watching or recording during prime time. This could be a good or a bad thing, depending on the level of productivity you’re trying to achieve in life, but it is definitely a new thing. Mostly this is happening because television, exhibiting the same survival instincts wooly mammoths used to trundle away from the coming ice age, is in full migration to the Internet.

Miami – Not Just Another Performing Arts Center

“Perhaps the most significant aspect of the 570,000-square-foot center’s design is not the details behind the dramatic interiors — a red-and-gold specially commissioned curtain in the opera house, the prominent use of wood throughout the concert hall. It’s the fact that the center, which occupies two square city blocks, doesn’t have a true front or back.”

Author Accused of Lying May Have The Last Word

Kathy O’Beirne stunned the Irish literary world when her memoir of “a life of child rape, abuse and violence that implicates nuns in the Catholic clergy as well as her late father” was released. But since publication, O’Beirne has been repeatedly accused of making the whole story up, and several of her own relatives have called the book a fraud. Now, O’Beirne believes she has the evidence to prove that her horrific story is true.

A (Wildly Successful) Product Of His Era

“The career curve that is traced [in a new London exhibition] takes Rodin from the youthful emulation of classical figures to a position of extra-ordinary eminence from whose heights he ‘heralded the modern age’… But this avid appetite for contemporary relevance is distracting: the more important point about Rodin is that he was not very modern at all, either in style or subject matter. In fact he was the 19th-century artist writ large, the product of an era when the capture of mainstream art by capital, and by the state, was a recent phenomenon, and when successful artists became not only powerful celebrities but also full participants in the social and economic establishment.”