“[A team of researchers in Italy] created a computer model of human talent and the way people use it to exploit opportunities in life. The model allows the team to study the role of chance in this process. … Their simulations accurately reproduce the wealth distribution in the real world. But the wealthiest individuals are not the most talented (although they must have a certain level of talent). They are the luckiest. And this has significant implications for the way societies can optimize the returns they get for investments in everything from business to science.”
Tag: 03.01.18
Why The Look Of TV Programs Has Become So Much Better
Less often do we focus on the cinematographers behind the lens, many of whom never saw themselves working in television until, in the last decade or so, the schisms between the small and big screens dwindled. And not merely in the scope of the stories or the quality of scripts: never before has television looked so good, from inventive camerawork to glossy lighting.
35 Years On, Can Leonard Bernstein’s ‘A Quiet Place’ Be Redeemed?
When the piece premiered at Houston Grand Opera in 1983, most of the reviews were harsh: The New York Times pronounced it “a pretentious failure.” Now, with the Bernstein centennial upon us, David Patrick Stearns looks at two versions of A Quiet Place – one brand new and released by Bernstein’s estate – that aim to show audiences the work’s underestimated strengths.
Harvey Schmidt, 88, Composer Of ‘The Fantasticks’ And ‘110 In The Shade’
“The Texas-born songwriter met his longtime lyricist Tom Jones when they were both students at the University of Texas/Austin in the late 1940s, and over the course of a career that spanned nearly the next half-century, Mr. Schmidt never wrote with anyone else.” Their most famous show, The Fantasticks, had the longest run of any play in American history: 17,162 performances over nearly 42 years in a small off-Broadway theater.
The Mystery Behind Frank Lloyd Wright’s Southern California Houses
Christopher Hawthorne: Was there some link between the violence in Wright’s personal life that sent him careening to California and the work he produced here? And what was it about pre-Columbian ruins that made them so attractive to Wright in the 1920s as the basis for an experimental, concrete-block L.A. architecture?
Opera Tampa Talks About Why It Cut Conductor Loose
Judith Lisi, Opera Tampa’s co-founder and CEO of the David A. Straz Jr. Center for the Performing Arts, has maintained that she did not know about the Canadian arrest warrant, which was issued in February 2017, until told by a Times reporter. But she has now acknowledged that Opera Tampa bought out the final eight months on Lipton’s contract. The reason, she said, was her concern over what she had heard about his behavior toward women.
An Author Used The Money From A Literary Prize To Set Up Another Literary Prize – For Translation
Daniel Hahn, who won the International Dublin literary award, decided it was past time to reward translator teams for their work. “Literary translation is a difficult profession to break into. Plenty of people want to do it, but in the insular English-speaking world, there’s regrettably little work to go around, and it’s easier for publishers to entrust their books to already-known translators who are seen as less of a risk. But there are many benefits to widening our pool of working translators, not least because new translators often lead us to meet new writers.”
First ‘Animal Farm’ Gets Banned In China, And Then The Letter ‘N’
Also: “Search terms blocked on Sino Weibo, a microblogging site which is China’s equivalent of Twitter, include ‘disagree’, ‘personality cult’, ‘lifelong’, ‘immortality’, ’emigrate’, and ‘shameless’.”
Somehow, London Is Still Talking About The Garden Bridge (The Somehow Being Boris Johnson)
Why is it under discussion? Because Johnson finally – finally – had to answer questions about the cost to the public of a bridge that never got built. “A total of £60m of public money was committed to the project, and £37.4m was spent by the Garden Bridge Trust without any construction work being done, even though a construction contract had been signed.”
Your Colleagues Probably Know You Way Better Than You Know Yourself
Adam Grant: “As a social scientist, if I want to get a read on your personality, I could ask you to fill out a survey on how stable, dependable, friendly, outgoing, and curious you are. But I would be much better off asking your coworkers to rate you on those same traits: They’re up to 12 times more accurate. They can see things that you can’t or won’t – and these studies reveal that whatever you know about yourself that your coworkers don’t is basically irrelevant to your job performance.”