Category: today’s top story

“When we do wish an experience would last forever, we don’t wish it for very long. Most of us let go of such impossible, incoherent desires almost as soon as they arise.”

“‘My studio’s gone, everything I’ve made at Pratt is gone,’ Ms. De Los Angeles said, sobbing as she stood outside the student union near the site of the fire. ‘I don’t even think I have a pencil.'”

“Generally, universities are doing very well financially, so they don’t feel from the data that their world is going to collapse. But I think even five years from now these enterprises are going to be in real trouble.”

According to the claim that was filed at the end of January, Lancelot Thwaytes seeks unspecified damages, interest and costs relating to the price difference between the £42,000 the painting sold for in 2006 and “what its true open market value was in 2006”, had it been attributed to Caravaggio and to be determined by expert evidence.

“Actors Theatre, one of a handful of professional theater companies in the Valley, has canceled the final two productions of its season and laid off six of eight employees as it takes a ‘pause’ to reinvent its business model.”

“Goodreads and smaller similar sites are addressing what publishers call the “discoverability” problem: How do you guide consumers to books they might want to read? The digital age has created online retail sites that are overflowing with new books, leaving readers awash in unknown titles.”

“Azerbaijan’s troubled efforts to portray itself as a progressive and Western-oriented country took a beating this week with the announcement by a pro-government political party that it will pay $12,700 to anyone who cuts off the ear of a 75-year-old novelist. The author is Akram Aylisli, and his crime is to have written a novella called Stone Dreams that is sympathetic to Armenians.”

“[He] emerged from the jazz caldron of Detroit in the mid-1950s and quickly became one of the primary instrumental voices of the hard-bop movement, a swinging blues-based style of jazz built around driving rhythms and tight ensemble work. … [He] later achieved commercial success, if not always critical acclaim, by exploring the contours of soul and funk music.”

“The real casualty of this battle, in Kitaj’s eyes, was his beloved wife and muse, Sandra Fisher, who died of a brain aneurysm aged 47, two weeks after his Tate show opened, and whose death the painter blamed directly on the shock of his very public critical humiliation.”

“The painting, created by Delacroix in 1830 to commemorate that year’s July Revolution, and depicting a woman triumphantly hoisting the tricolor French flag, has been on display at a new branch of the Louvre Museum in Lens, in northern France.”