Archaeologists Find Cemetery Rife With Sexual Symbolism

“In the women’s coffins, the Chinese archaeologists encountered one or more life-size wooden phalluses…. Looking again at the shaping of the 13-foot poles that rise from the prow of each woman’s boat, the archaeologists concluded that the poles were in fact gigantic phallic symbols,” corresponding to “symbolic vulvas” on the men’s.

A Lost Original Shakespeare Play Is Real, Arden Declares

“[F]or most of the three centuries since its debut, Double Falsehood; or, the Distrest Lovers has been ridiculed as a hoax or just disregarded. Yesterday that changed when The Arden Shakespeare … published Double Falsehood, endorsing its credentials and making it available in a fully annotated form for the first time in 250 years.”

Signature Theatre Gets New Home, Just Not At Ground Zero

The 42nd Street space still has “three theaters of varying sizes; an open lobby with a cafe and a bookstore; and the prominent [Frank] Gehry as designer.” It’s also “budgeted at a mere $60 million and is actually under construction, in contrast to the planned arts center at the World Trade Center site, which increasingly seems like a pipe dream.”

Tech Worry: Preserving Authors’ Digital Archives

“Electronically produced drafts, correspondence and editorial comments, sweated over by contemporary poets, novelists and nonfiction authors, are ultimately just a series of digits — 0’s and 1’s — written on floppy disks, CDs and hard drives, all of which degrade much faster than old-fashioned acid-free paper.” The technology ages faster, too.