Category: today’s top story

“Ever since the wave of urban protest that hit the country in late 2011, Vladimir “Putin and his United Russia Party seem to have decided to cut their losses with the country’s finicky élites and focus on demonizing them as Western agents for the benefit of a poorer, older, more rural voter base. … Everything blunt, homespun, and orthodox is in. Everything multifaceted, foreign, avant-garde, or deviant is out.”

“After a tense decade of air raid sirens, duck-and-cover drills and fears of Soviet superiority, hope for America came in an unlikely form in the late 1950s: a lanky, 23-year-old Texan with a head full of curls and huge hands that ranged across a piano keyboard with virtuosic power.”

“A person familiar with Barnes & Nobles’s strategy acknowledged that this quarter, which includes holiday sales, has caused executives to realize the company must move away from its program to engineer and build its own devices and focus more on licensing its content to other device makers.”

“More than 60 % of UK theatres and producing companies have said they have cancelled or postponed at least one production since April 2012, according to a survey looking at the impact of funding cuts on new writing.”

After 20 years at the musical helm of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, he crowned his career with a decade as music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Sawallisch described those ten years as the high point of his symphonic life, and many observers (including more than a few of the players) believe that he was the best music director the Philadelphians ever had.

“The English theatre scene is ‘shrivelling,’ according to research, with two-thirds of venues cancelling productions, half producing fewer new plays and commissioning fewer writers, and the same proportion obliged to insist playwrights focus on smaller cast sizes.”

“Mantel was attacking the paper doll in which newspapers have imprisoned the real Kate Middleton. … The point of Mantel’s piece was necessarily invisible to parsing in a Daily Mail news story. So a story had to be made – because here was a famous writer writing about a subject of intense interest to the paper – by missing the point.”

“The clue – a simple fingerprint on a juice bottle stolen from Whole Foods – was routine. But that, along with some creative undercover work, helped the authorities unravel the brazen daylight theft of a Dalí drawing from an Upper East Side gallery that had gone unsolved for months.”

“Experiments going back to the 19th century repeatedly show that people invariably prefer images in these proportions, but no one has known why.”