“After all, you can wear professional-looking clothes and behave in a way appropriate to your job, but as soon as you open your mouth, your accent betrays your upbringing. As the linguist Chi Luu explained …, research shows that we are quickly judged based on how we speak.” (Especially in Britain.)
Tag: 03.19.18
Lawrence Ferlinghetti At 99
Yes, Ferlinghetti has scaled back his involvement with City Lights, where he shares an office with former City Lights Publishers editor Nancy Peters, co-owner of the store. But the celebrated bookseller, publisher and former San Francisco poet laureate nevertheless maintains an active lifestyle — and life of the mind — that anyone far younger would envy.
In The Sentimental (And Not Very Good) Homage Cartoons To Dead Celebrities, We See The Dying Of Political Cartoons
Ouch: “We are instantly ready to be nostalgic about anything and anybody. Death tribute cartoons are a feature of a society constantly being made aware of what it has lost. They’re never funny, they rarely make much sense, and they pander in a way that’s embarrassing. I’m sure we’ll see many more of them.”
Can Anyone Actually Teach Creative Writing?
Maybe, but not this way: “Increasingly, English departments are assigning intro Creative Writing courses to grad students, who receive minimal training and may be required to use a standard syllabus. The standard syllabi are designed to be simple, so that anybody can be plugged in to the class at the last minute and run it smoothly. They’re designed by a well-intentioned person in the department who needs to endure several rounds of approvals from higher-ranking faculty, at least some of whom don’t believe Creative Writing is a serious academic pursuit. A system like this is bound to produce stale, myopic syllabi that offer as limited a view of what it means to be a writer as possible.”
We Know Video Games Don’t Cause Real-Life Violence, But Do We Know Why That Is? Here’s A Researcher Who Does
In the wake of the last Florida school shooting, and as a lead-up to this weekend’s March for Our Lives, here’s a conversation with Villanova University research psychologist Patrick Markey, co-author of Mortal Kombat: Why the War on Violent Video Games Is Wrong.
This Production Of ‘Julius Caesar’ Needs Stage Managers Versed In Crowd Control – For The Audience
Nicholas Hytner’s staging for the Bridge Theatre in London (starring Ben Whishaw and David Morrissey) takes place on a series of platforms right in the middle of the audience, and the ticket-holders standing in the pit at the center of it all play the mob. Fergus Morgan talks to the stage managers about how they wrangle a new crowd for every performance.
Robert Grossman, Illustrator With Sharp Eye And Pen For Political Satire, Dead At 78
“On magazine covers and in newspaper pages, Mr. Grossman chronicled and caricatured a half-century’s worth of politicians, pop-culture figures and social issues. He had a knack for causing a stir with his colorful images, whether they be one-shot covers for magazines like Rolling Stone and Time or serial comic strips for The New York Observer or New York magazine.” One of his most famous images was a National Lampoon cover showing Richard Nixon with a breathtakingly long Pinocchio nose; another was on the poster for the greatest film comedy of all time.
Picasso’s Largest-Ever Work, Never Completed, To Be Realized Via Virtual Reality
“For almost 50 years, the artist Pablo Picasso’s wild vision for a massive 102ft high public monument” – titles Bust of a Woman – “which was to have been the world’s tallest concrete sculpture, has remained unrealised. Now, however, scholars at the University of South Florida, Tampa, are venturing to make it a reality – that is to say, a virtual reality.”
LA’s MoCA Still Silent About Firing Of Head Curator (So We’ll Speculate)
Christopher Knight: “Today, about a week later, we still have no answer as to why MOCA Director Philippe Vergne fired chief curator Helen Molesworth — and we likely won’t. I have a few speculations, which I’ll get to. But the action represents larger stresses vexing the museum world in our New Gilded Age.”
John Oliver’s Gay Bunny Book Parodying Vice President’s Rabbit Book Tops Amazon Charts
On Sunday night John Oliver announced on HBO’s Last Week Tonight that A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo, a children’s book about a gay bunny, named after a pet rabbit owned by the family of Vice President Mike Pence, would be available immediately. That meant it beat a rival children’s book, Marlon Bundo’s Day in the Life of the Vice President, written by Pence’s daughter Charlotte, and illustrated by his wife, Karen, by mere hours to the digital shelves.