Category: today’s top story

Smoking To Be A Factor In Rating Movies

“The Motion Picture Assn. of America announced today that smoking will be considered when rating movies and ‘depictions that glamorize smoking or movies that feature pervasive smoking outside of an historic or other mitigating context may receive a higher rating.’ Smoking will become a factor in decisions by the Classification and Rating Administration, along with violence, language, nudity, drug abuse and other elements.”

Should Harvard Professors Know How To Teach?

“Harvard is where academic superstars are continually expected to revolutionize their fields of knowledge. Cutting-edge research is emphasized, and recognized with tangible rewards: tenure, money, prestige, prizes, fame.” But should these expert researchers be expected to be great teachers as well? A new internal report calls for “sweeping institutional change, including continuing evaluation and assessment of teaching and learning, and a proposal that teaching be weighed equally with contributions to research in annual salary adjustments.”

Why Are Americans Tuning Out TV?

Ratings are down, and 2.5 million fewer people watched American network TV this spring than last year. “Everyone has a theory to explain the plummeting ratings: early Daylight Savings Time, more reruns, bad shows, more shows being recorded or downloaded or streamed. Scariest of all for the networks, however, is the idea that many people are now making their own television schedules.”

In Defense Of Smoking On Stage

The failure to exempt “artistic performances from Chicago’s wholly laudable ban on indoor, public smoking” is “a dangerous and serious mistake,” Chris Jones writes. “In the theater, we exempt those otherwise undesirable and illegal activities because we understand they serve a greater good-our need to explore who we are, remember who we were, try out what we may be. If there were no warriors on the stage, there would be far fewer pacifists on the streets. If there were no thugs on stage, there would be fewer civilizing laws in real life.”

PBS Standing Firm Behind Burns

PBS says that Ken Burns has earned the right to tell the story of World War II as he sees fit, without interference from the Hispanic interest groups which have been demanding changes to the documentarian’s latest work. As the Congressional Hispanic Caucus gets into the act, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting “reminded Congress of the editorial independence that was guaranteed in the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967.”

An Expensive Rivalry

“This spring auction houses are touting stunning images by masters like Rothko and Warhol, Bacon and de Kooning. Price estimates are equally stunning, reflecting the fight for market share between the archrivals Sotheby’s and Christie’s. Their competition has never been deadlier, riskier or more expensive.”

A Museum Where Art And Architect Cooperate

Christopher Hawthorne loves the Seattle Art Museum’s new home, mainly because it manages to properly showcase the art inside it without subsuming the architect’s skill and vision. “Increasingly, the most satisfying new museums are the ones that manage to bypass that art-versus-architecture debate and give visitors a real variety of visual and spatial experience.”

Without Founder, Ensemble’s Future In Question

“To everyone who knew him, Curt Dempster was the Ensemble Studio Theater. On Jan. 19, Dempster, 71, was found dead in the Greenwich Village studio apartment he shared with two dogs”; his death was a suicide. “Dempster left a note asking his superintendent to find a home for the dogs. More uncertain was what the future held for the off-Broadway theater he had founded some 35 years earlier in a condemned Manhattan building and turned into one of the country’s most prodigious developers of theater talent.”