In the fall of 2015, historians visiting the Altomünster Abbey outside Munich found in its library “at least 500 books, … including precious illuminated manuscripts from the 16th century, chants used by the uniquely women-led Bridgettine Order and processionals bursting with colorful religious and ornamental decoration in their margins.” Not long afterwards, the Vatican decided to close the convent, which has only one nun left, and put the entire collection on lockdown, and the Munich archdiocese refuses to let researchers near it.
Tag: 12.26.16
The First Author In History We Know By Name Was A Woman
The 23rd-century-BCE Sumerian priestess and poet Enheduanna wrote hymns whose influence, in terms of form and subject, stretched all the way to the Hebrews, the Greeks, and even early Christians.
How A Building Shaped The Magazine The Economist Became
“Just as the design of prisons can make rehabilitation easier or harder, and as school buildings influence how children learn, so offices mould the people who work in them. They make some kinds of interaction easy and others hard, which shapes the way of working. Over the years the building has shaped The Economist in several ways, some good, some less so.”
Evelyn Waugh’s Extraordinary Gift For Insult
“[The] novelist, travel writer, essayist, and biographer … the 50th anniversary of whose death rolled around this year, celebrated by those survivors who had the misfortune of knowing him at all well, was as wretched and ornery a human being as anyone could be who was not actually moved to suicide or murder.”
Are “Liberal Elite” Performers Missing The Point?
“The all-encompassing liberalism in popular culture might not be hurting the performers’ financial bottom lines (so far), but it’s certainly not doing anything to help their political causes, either. As we learned this election, we ignore whole segments of the population at our peril.”
Could Wood – Glued-Together Layered Slabs Of It – Become The Next High-Tech Building Material?
“Sandwiching layers of wood and adhesive,yields cross-laminated timber (CLT), a kind of super-plywood that comes in immense slabs as long as a bowling lane and as thick as 12 inches. A similar process yields steel-hard beams called glulam. The principle is almost touchingly simple: ‘Gluing a stack of cards together produces something stronger than building a house of cards.'” And you can build skyscrapers with it.
The Young Ballerino Dancing His Way From The Slums To The Stage
Joel Kioko “grew up in Nairobi’s Kuwinda slum and took his first dance class five years ago in a public school classroom, with bare walls, no barre and no mirror, the desks and chairs pushed outside.”
John Williams Is The Reason Star Wars Resonates So Much, So What Is The New Star Wars Movie Doing Without A John Williams Score?
“A big part of what makes Williams’s music so resonant is his consistent, masterful use of shifting themes—across all of the films—to carry ideas and represent characters. In that way, the franchise has more in common with Wagnerian epic opera than with your standard action movie, where sound is so often used to trigger a quick emotion.”
The Pay Dispute In Small Los Angeles Theatre Gets Even More Dramatic (And Weird)
There’s a new minimum wage for actors at L.A.’s 99-seat theatres (a special Equity category), but theatre owners, as well as some actors, say the minimum wage threatens their work, and they want it to go away.
Tapestry Of Sabra And Shatila Massacres Could Hang Next To Picasso’s ‘Guernica’
“Ramzi Dalloul, a Palestinian businessman and collector of Arab art, has commissioned the Royal Tapestry Factory in Madrid to transform Iraqi artist Dia al-Azzawi’s drawing of the atrocity into a 21-sq.-m wall hanging. … On a visit to the 300-year-old factory when work on the tapestry started, the Spanish culture minister asked Dalloul if the finished piece could be displayed alongside Picasso’s Guernica” at the Reina Sofia Museum.