“He got hooked on the idea that movie title sequences could be more than just ‘book covers,’ as he once described it, and he parlayed that concept into a 50-year career designing title sequences for more than 500 movies … [and] scores of television shows” — from The Searchers to the Godfather series and from The Dick Van Dyke Show to Dallas. – Los Angeles Times
Tag: 09.30.19
Ancient Romans Used Infographics
A new book by classicist and historian Andrew M. Riggsby investigates the types of information technologies (IT) drawn, painted, and inscribed on the surfaces of the ancient Roman world and explores how they shaped the daily life of Romans. As Riggsby demonstrates, effective graphic design has been a tricky but important ability for thousands of years. – Hyperallergic
The Three Ages Of Podcasting
“What started as a quiet digital backwater is now increasingly growing in prominence, drawing the attention of audiences and moneyed interests alike. … And the story of how we go here can be told via two major turning points: The first was everything that happened before and after 2014. The second turning point is happening right now.” – Vulture
Listening Clubs Bring Audiences Of NPR’s Spanish-Language Podcast Together In Real Life
Radio Ambulante has a Facebook group with thousands of members in more than 19 countries. Editors there decided, “Let’s go back to the first place and do this but offline. We don’t want to have Facebook in between you and other listeners.” So they’ve organized listening clubs (the podcast equivalent of book clubs) for people to meet in person, listen to Radio Ambulante, and discuss what they’ve heard. – Nieman Lab
What Paul Badura-Skoda Did For Classical Piano
Richard Brody: “Though he didn’t have the most immediately recognizable or ravishing sound at the keyboard, he succeeded in revising, by way of scholarly passion, the very basis for pianistic sound and beauty — and, for that matter, the physical relationship of pianists to their instruments.” – The New Yorker
This Year’s Giller Prize Finalists
The 2019 shortlist features three authors previously nominated for the Giller Prize. Ohlin was shortlisted in 2012 for the novel Inside, Crummey was shortlisted in 2001 for the novel River Thieves and Bezmozgis was nominated in 2011 for The Free World and again in 2014 for The Betrayers. – CBC
Emmanuel Macron’s Plan To Save France’s Declining Villages: 1,000 Cafés
The president’s project, called 1000 Cafés and run by a nonprofit called Groupe SOS, will receive up to €200 million from the French government to open new cafés, or prop up struggling ones, in villages with fewer than 3,500 residents. Nearly a third of France’s population still lives in such villages, and more than half of those no longer have a commercial establishment of any kind. – Slate
New York Times Changes Its Bestseller Lists
After cutting the mass market paperback and graphic novel/manga lists in 2017, the Times‘ Best Sellers team will again track mass market paperback sales, as well as debut a combined list for graphic books, which will include fiction, nonfiction, children’s, adults, and manga. Two new monthly children’s lists, middle grade paperback and young adult paperback, will debut as well. (The Times retired its middle grade e-book and young adult e-book lists in 2017.) In addition, the Times will cut its science and sports lists, explaining that “the titles on those lists are frequently represented on current nonfiction lists.” – Publishers Weekly
Can Sound, Music, Physically Heal Our Bodies?
Interest in sound therapy has soared in tandem with renewed global curiosity about cosmic energy and spirituality. Case in point, sales of “healing crystals” have doubled in the previous three years. – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Notre-Dame: A Progress Report, Five Months After The Fire
What’s being done with the rubble, the windows, and the stabilization of the walls; who is, and who will be, running the restoration effort; what the next steps will be; and the general philosophy behind the work. – The Art Newspaper