“A 10-year campaign to overhaul child licensing and performance regulations is celebrating success after the introduction of a new act marked the biggest change in legislation in more than 40 years.”
Tag: 03.04.15
Veteran Theater Critic Margaret Croyden Dead At 92
“Born in Brooklyn and educated in New York, Ms. Croyden contributed regularly to The New York Times during the 1970s and 80s, The New York Times Magazine, The Village Voice, American Theatre, The Nation and Theater Week” and wrote books about stage directors Jerzy Grotowski and Peter Brook.
Should We Really Censor The Anti-Semitism In “The Merchant Of Venice”?
No less a Shakespearean than Mark Rylance recently said yes. Director Rupert Goold thinks shining a light on that prejudice is important. Booker Prize-winning novelist Howard Jacobson says removing the prejudice from the script “is to tear out its very heart.” At least one Arab director won’t even go near the play.
The Power And Importance Of Touch (It’s Huge)
Remember the orphanages of Ceausescu-era Romania, overstuffed and understaffed institutions where infants and young children were severely touch-deprived – and grew up seriously disturbed? Maria Konnikova explains why that was no fluke.
The 1906 Novel That Imagined New York In 2015
“Set ninety years after the cataclysmic Terror of 1925, Sutphen’s book imagines that the world of 2015 has devolved into three tribes: the Painted People, the House People, and the marauding Doomsmen. Keeps, drawbridges, archery, and Sirs and Ladies have grown back as thickly as vines over the ruins of American civilization. At the center of it all is the city of Doom, ‘gigantic, threatening, omnipotent,’ and ruled by the post-apocalyptic godfather Dom Gillian.”
Wordnesia: When You Forget How To Spell Or Pronounce The Simplest Of Werds
In the 1996 movie Black Sheep David Spade, “glances at a fold-up map and realizes he somehow has become unfamiliar with the name for paved driving surfaces. ‘Robes? Rouges? Rudes?‘ Nothing seems right. … ‘Rowds. Row-ads.‘ … Row-ad-type word wig outs similar to the one portrayed in that movie are things that actually happen, in real life, to people with full and total control over their mental capacities.”
Why Do Japanese Seem Fond Of Insects While Westerners Abhor Them?
“Travel agencies advertise firefly-watching tours, there are televised beetle-wrestling competitions and beetle petting zoos. Department stores and even vending machines sell live insects. … Not all Japanese, perhaps not even the majority, admire insects. But while Western culture amplifies our perhaps innately human suspicion of insects into distaste and fear, Japanese culture encourages affection, even reverence, for the six-legged. Why?”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 03.04.15
On Selfies vs. Self-Portraits and Universal Beauty vs. What I Find Beautiful (Beauty Class Portfolio Assignments)
AJBlog: Jumper Published 2015-03-04
Art and Puppies
AJBlog: Engaging Matters Published 2015-03-04
Hot competition
AJBlog: Sandow Published 2015-03-04
Just Because: Dizzy Gillespie, 1987
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2015-03-03
[ssba_hide]
Rethinking How Technology Can Help Students Learn
“We’ve seen that technology can do a lot of stuff to support students, but the real driver is: Do they actually want to learn something? If they do, kids will go through a lot of barriers to learn it. Creating the conditions that turn on that drive has become the major function of our work.”
Biggest Selling Book Last Week? Workers Of The World Unite!
“More than 1,700 bargain copies of The Communist Manifesto have sold in the last week, in the form of an 80p edition of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s call to the working classes to revolt.”