“When physicists translated a 13th-century Latin text into modern equations, they discovered that the English theologian who wrote it had unwittingly predicted the idea of the multiverse in 1225. While the work probably won’t advance current models, it does show that some of the philosophical conundrums posed by cosmology are surprisingly pervasive.”
Tag: 03.13.14
Should Actors Say Goodbye To California?
“If you’re having trouble getting in rooms in L.A. and you’re open to moving, or you have some sort of connection to the Southeast, then you’re better off moving to a hub like New Orleans or Atlanta and taking advantage of this market.”
Bookaholic? You And Your Bestie Are Now In The (Print!) OED
“The dictionary covers everything, not just words average people use in daily conversation. Among the new entries, for example, are drool-inducing adjectives like ethnopharmacologic and now-extinct creatures like the scimitar-horned oryx. (We’ll pour one out for you, Ory.)”
Lyricist Tim Rice On The Key To Success: Failure
“I always worry today when I see everybody has to pass – there’s very little failure these days. I think failure is the best thing for some people.”
Turn It Down! (We’ve Made The World Too Loud And We’re Being Hurt By It)
“Hearing-damaged infants become hearing-damaged teenagers who listen to loud music that further damages their hearing, who then become hearing-damaged adults who go to events that further damage their hearing, who then have children whose hearing is damaged because their parents cannot hear.”
Professional Writers Unions Admit Self-Published Authors (So What’s The Point?)
“If anyone who declares herself to be a writer is one, then what is the point of a professional organization? Will the group be taken at all seriously?”
Saudi Book Fair Yanks Mahmoud Darwish’s ‘Blasphemous’ Poetry
“The publications administration at the [Riyadh International] book fair, one of the biggest of its kind in the Arab world, ordered the removal of all books containing [the Palestinian poet’s] work after youths from the religious police complained about the content of the books. … Darwish, who died in 2008, is considered a modern Arab literary giant.”
Paul Taylor Dance Co. to Relaunch With Other Choreographers’ Works
“‘I prefer to think I’m going to live forever,’ said Mr. Taylor, 83 years old. ‘At some point, they’re going to not let me make dances anymore, so I have to think ahead.'”
How Did the Stakes for TV Series Finales Get So High?
“When I heard pleas from several friends in the week leading up to the last episode that True Detective would ‘stick the landing,’ it wasn’t just out of a hope that the narrative would tie up in a satisfying catharsis. The statement was filled with more anxiety than that – the need for a tangible return on obsessive investment.”
It’s Awkward to Be Writing a Novel Set in Present-Day Crimea
David Bezmozgis: “As I was writing the book, I kept changing when the action was set, constantly pushing the date ahead by another year … I closely followed the news to see if real events had yet outpaced my inventions. I expected this to happen at any moment in Israel, … [not in] Ukraine and Crimea, places I’d believed to be locked in a dismal kleptocratic stasis.”