“Twenty-one publishing houses in Japan will form an organization in February to stave off potential threats to their profits from Amazon.com Inc. and other service providers in the burgeoning e-book market. … The publishers are concerned they may be left out if Japanese authors give Amazon exclusive rights to publish e-versions of their books.”
Tag: 01.14.10
V&A Museum To Close Musical Instrument Gallery
The Victoria & Albert’s display “looks certain to close next month in order to make way for an expanded display of the museum’s fashion and costume holdings. While a number of the instruments will remain exhibited as part of other sections … most of them will be placed in storage, available on request, or distributed among other museums and collections.”
What A Stage Full Of Naked Women Can Teach Us
“What is striking about Trilogy,” a theatre piece, “is how unfamiliar we have become with the familiar sight of the female form. From the cult of the Virgin Mary in late-middle ages European art to the surgically sculpted cover girls of today, the perfected female nude has been rendered the idealised aesthetic and unequivocal, aspirational norm.”
Burj Architects: Wright Didn’t Influence Our Design
Despite what critics have inferred, “the real influences on the Burj Khalifa begin with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s radical unbuilt plans for glass-sheathed towers, designed in 1921 while Mies lived and worked in his native Germany.”
Court Denies Heir’s Appeal On Looted Norton Simon Works
“The nearly 500-year-old paintings by Lucas Cranach the Elder are on separate wooden panels and depict Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, moments before the Fall.”
Study: 9 Million-Plus Illegal Downloads Of Popular E-Books
“The report focuses on the illegal downloads of 913 popular titles in their digital format, finding that on average each [title] was downloaded without payment about 10,000 times.”
Two More Reasons For Being Religious: Sex And Stress Relief
“Men and women shown dating profiles of attractive members of the same sex will describe themselves as more religious than people who don’t feel as if they have to compete in the attractiveness stakes. Meanwhile, another study finds that thoughts of randomness push people toward God – but only if they can’t attribute feelings of stress to some easily defined external factor.”
How Playboy Changed America
“The historian Elizabeth Fraterrigo asks us to accept a somewhat unlikely premise, which is this: A titty magazine that has been culturally irrelevant since the late 1970s was at the forefront of many of this nation’s most important social upheavals and reconfigurations. … [One] closes her book largely convinced that she is right.”
William J. Lederer, 97, Co-Author of The Ugly American
A career naval officer, he co-wrote “a novel that was among the first books to deal with American involvement in Southeast Asia and that barely veiled a blistering critique of the nation’s foreign policy there.”
Ballerina Boot Camp
The documentary TuTuMUCH “is a real and often shocking look into the life of a ballerina trying to make it into the professional world. It’s full of excitement and disappointment, tears and laughter and hard decisions regarding years of sacrifice and pain and the limitations of one’s anatomy. And it’s all from the mouths of children.”