“The furor over Webster’s Third also marked the end of an era. It’s a safe bet that no new dictionary will ever incite a similar uproar, whatever it contains. The dictionary simply doesn’t have the symbolic importance it did a half-Âcentury ago.”
Tag: 09.25.11
Kennedy Center To Have New Organ, Two More Years Of Eschenbach
“Christoph Eschenbach, the internationally renowned conductor and music director of the Kennedy Center [and its National Symphony Orchestra], will extend his contract for two years, through the 2014-15 season. And the concert hall will, at long last, be getting a new organ.”
How Cervantes Created ‘Fiction’ And ‘Reality’
“The point to stress is that the characters [in Don Quixote] can argue about the nature of their perceptions only insofar as we, the readers, have a concept of reality that is independent of their various reports. In fact, the common notion of objective reality that most of us would recognize today … is mutually dependent on” the concept of a fictional narrative.
The Robots Poised To Take Your Job
“At this moment, there’s someone training for your job. He may not be as smart as you are–in fact, he could be quite stupid–but what he lacks in intelligence he makes up for in drive, reliability, consistency, and price. He’s willing to work for longer hours, and he’s capable of doing better work, at a much lower wage. He doesn’t ask for health or retirement benefits, he doesn’t take sick days, and he doesn’t goof off when he’s on the clock.”
Angela Gheorghiu Talks Marriage With Roberto Alagna
She and her new husband exploited their double star-power, selling hundreds of thousands of albums of their duets, and dropping titbits to the press about how they liked to make love before a performance “to relax the voice”. But she bristles at the suggestion that the marriage was a career booster. “My career is not related to any man, thank God!”
The Culture Right Now: Focused On The Past
“Are our most popular films, books and TV shows too entrenched in nostalgia?”
New EU Ruling Extends Music Copyright To 70 Years
“Songwriters and composers are already guaranteed royalties on their recordings for life plus 70 years. The new ruling by the EU’s Council of Ministers means that, from 2013, artists of the 1960s who were not talented enough to pen their own music and garnered income only through performing the songs of others will no longer face losing their royalty this decade, but will keep receiving a payment until the 2030s.”
Hollywood After The DVD
“After desperate attempts to prop up the industry’s once-thriving DVD business, studio executives now believe the only hope of turning around a 40% decline in home entertainment revenue lies in rapidly accelerating the delivery of movies over the Internet.”
Remember When A Dictionary Could Cause Outrage?
When it was published in 1961, Webster’s Third New International Dictionary “was widely denounced for what critics viewed as a lax admissions policy: it opened its columns to parvenus like ‘litterbug’ and ‘wise up,’ declined to condemn ‘ain’t,’ and illustrated its definitions with quotations from down-market sources like Ethel Merman and Betty Grable.”
‘I Am A Canvas’ – Two Artists Who Reinvent Body Painting
Liu Bolin “paints himself into” locations around the world, covering his body so as to blend into, say, a Beijing commune or the bronze bull on Wall Street. Emma Hack makes “skin illustrations,” asking models “to stand still for between eight and 15 hours while she covers them in intricate patterns.”