Category: today’s top story

“The young, who cannot read a text for more than a few minutes without texting, who rely on the web for both their love affairs and their memories of heartache, and who can sometimes find even cinema difficult to take unless it comes replete with electronic feedback loops, are not our future: we, the Gutenberg minds have no future, and our art forms and our criticism of those art forms will soon belong only to the academy and the museum.”

“Eleanor Catton made Man Booker prize history twice on Tuesday night the youngest winner for, at 832 pages, the longest novel. The New Zealander was 25 when she began writing The Luminaries, an epic 19th-century gold rush murder mystery.” (She is now 28.)

“Having initially trained at Rada as an actor, the 48-year-old has since directed theatre in the West End and on Broadway, as well as having experience with opera and film. In 2012 his film Broken premiered at the Cannes Film Festival before winning best British independent film at the British Independent Film Awards.”

“The fundamental issue is this: How can the DIA contribute the hundreds of millions in revenue to Detroit’s financial restructuring that Kevyn Orr expects — without selling art, harming the museum and its reputation, or jeopardizing the $22 million in annual property tax support from Macomb, Oakland and Wayne counties that keeps the DIA afloat.”

Yep, you’ll need to see the 1590s domestic drama Arden of Faversham plus at least two more plays if you want to complete the canon – or so says “linguistic fingerprint” analysis that reveals the Bard as “reviser, rewriter and collaborator.”

“Back in the 1950s and 60s, when Munro began, there was a feeling that not only female writers but Canadians were thought to be both trespassing and transgressing. Munro found herself referred to as ‘some housewife’, and was told that her subject matter, being too ‘domestic’, was boring. A male writer told her she wrote good stories, but he wouldn’t want to sleep with her. ‘Nobody invited him,’ said Munro tartly.”

“Ms. Munro revolutionized the architecture of short stories, often beginning a story in an unexpected place, then moving backward or forward in time. She brought a modesty and subtle wit to her work that her admirers often traced to her background growing up in rural Canada.”

“Mr. Kauffmann’s varied careers went from being an actor and a stage manager with a Manhattan repertory company, and as a book editor and a writer of vaguely philosophical novels, before he was named film critic at The New Republic in 1958. His reflective, highly wrought essays appeared weekly for the next 55 years, with a break in 1966, when he was briefly the chief theater critic for The New York Times.”

“I had thought Gladwell was inadvertently misunderstanding the science he was writing about and making sincere mistakes in the service of coming up with ever more ‘Gladwellian’ insights to serve his audience. But according to his own account, he knows exactly what he is doing, and not only that, he thinks it is the right thing to do”

“The bronze sculpture, installed in the Overland Park Arboretum, shows a headless, bare-breasted woman photographing herself. Artist Yu Chang may have intended it as a criticism of sexting, but the American Family Association of Kansas and Missouri sees his work as obscene.” And since citizens can have grand juries empaneled in Kansas, the AFA has had one convened (it returned no indictment) and is trying for another.