“Our built-in dopamine-reward system makes instant gratification highly desirable, and the future difficult to balance with the present. This worked fine on the savanna… but not [in] the suburbs: We gorge on fatty foods and use credit cards to buy luxuries we can’t actually afford. And then, overworked, underslept and overdrawn, we find ourselves anxious and depressed.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Are Art Sales the Best Free Theatre in London?
“Even in the intervals at the Royal Opera House, I’d never seen such a bunch of well-groomed, glossy, bouffy-haired folk, and that was just the specialist art-market journalists.”
China Needs a Good PR Team (or Ten)
James Fallows: “How can official China possibly do such a clumsy and self-defeating job of presenting itself to the world? China, like any big, complex country, is a mixture of goods and bads. But I have rarely seen a governing and ‘communications’ structure as consistent in hiding the good sides and highlighting the bad. […] [sometimes] it was as if the government had hired The Onion as its image consultant.”
Ohad Naharin’s ‘Gaga’ Style – Innovative Dance or Staged Pilates?
The style of movement, “which Naharin devised when he had back trouble,… is rooted in the dancers’ own movement patterns, making them conscious of their bodies in an extraordinary way, graceful and jerky at the same time, strong in balance and vivid in the articulation of every muscle and bone. The results are distinctive, but limiting.”
Founder of America’s Biggest Little Circus Is Leaving the Ring
“Paul Binder, the 66-year-old founder, artistic director and ringmaster of the Big Apple Circus, will be stepping away from the tanbark next year after three decades as boss man of the little top.”
George Frideric Handel, Businessman and Gourmand
“London’s Handel House Museum, where the German-born composer died, will host an exhibition in 2009 focussing on his passion for food and his finances to mark the 250th anniversary of his death.”
Italian Government Privatizing Cinecittà
“Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi-led government is selling off its [24%] stake in Rome’s Cinecittà Studios, completing the privatization of the historic facilities and ending an era in Italo film.”
Margaret Atwood Says She’s Not a Social Campaigner
“There are aspects of my books that are there because they are present in real life. It’s not my mission to carry out this task or else I wouldn’t be a writer, I would be a leader of some movement or a propagandist. It would bore us all to read something where everything is wonderful, where everything goes well, without any problems.”
NY City Opera Almost Doesn’t Make Payroll
“The financially troubled New York City Opera furloughed employees for two days last week because it feared it would run out of money to pay them, a spokesman said Wednesday.”
Leeds To Get £12M Dance Center
“The six-storey building [scheduled for completion in summer 2010] will feature seven dance studios, a 200-seat theatre, office spaces, a health suite and costume workshop. Alongside the two professional companies [Northern Ballet Theatre and Phoenix Dance Theatre], the site will eventually house a full-time classical dance school and Leeds Metropolitan University’s dance degree courses.”