Inspired by The Spotty Dog Books & Ale in New York’s Hudson Valley, Jason Wuerfel turned to Kickstarter for start-up capital and opened Books and Brews. He made all the furniture by hand and brews all the beer on-site.
Tag: 03.20.14
If You Want To Succeed As An Actor, Maybe Be A Producer Too
“No matter how good you are or how hard you work, the jobs may not be forthcoming. But instead of drowning in a pool of disillusionment, it is possible to take the power back.”
We Just Assume That Reading Is Good For You. But Is It?
“Reading has the best PR team in the business. Or perhaps it’s just that devoted readers have better access to the language of advocacy and celebration than chain-smokers or, say, power-ballad enthusiasts. Either way, somewhere along the line, an orthodoxy hardened: cigarettes will kill you and Bon Jovi will give you a migraine, but reading – the ideal diet being Shakespeare and 19th-century novels, plus the odd modernist – will make you healthier, stronger, kinder.”
New “Smart” Cities Reimagine How We Interact
New “smart cities”, built from scratch, are sprouting across the planet and traditional actors like governments, urban planners and real estate developers, are, for the first time, working alongside large IT firms — the likes of IBM, Cisco, and Microsoft. The resulting cities are based on the idea of becoming “living labs” for new technologies at the urban scale, blurring the boundary between bits and atoms, habitation and telemetry.
New US Laws Banning Sale Of Ivory Snares Owners Of Pianos, Guitars, Art…
“To illustrate the confusion ahead, experts gave the example of what would happen under the new regulations if someone attempted the interstate sale of a 100-year-old Steinway piano with ivory keys. Such a sale has long been permissible, because the piano qualified as an antique that contained ivory imported long before the mid-1970s, when officials began proscribing the material. But the new regulations would prohibit such a sale unless the owner could prove the ivory in the keys had entered the country through one of 13 American ports authorized to sanction ivory goods.”
Why We Like Art That Doesn’t Take Much Time
“On a prosaic level, short art frees up precious time. The vexed problem of whether to eat before or after the show evaporates when the thing wraps up after an hour or so. Scheduling becomes easier, and the workweek less of a barrier, if you can make it home by 10.”
Twenty Years After The Culture Wars (What Went Wrong?)
“We in the art world were not very clear about our moral imperative around freedom of expression. When I think about it, nobody won that culture war. But we lost it… Last year, the NEA Four were in residence at the New Museum in New York… I’ve been thinking about why is it now—Are the body fluids dry enough? Is the blood purged enough?—that 20 years later, suddenly people are looking back at these artists?”
French Police Recover Rembrandt Stolen 15 Years Ago
“It was stolen on 14 July 1999, when the local Bastille Day parade served as a diversion, and the theives gained access to the museum through the municipal library next door. Though the alarm went off, the police arrived too late to catch the burglars.”
25 Years After Fukuyama’s “End Of History” Argument
“In the post-historical period,” Fukuyama continues, “there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history. I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed.” Doesn’t this vision seem exactly right?
The Science Of Analyzing Literature (Or Is It?)
“Viewed from Franco Moretti’s statistical mountaintop, traditional literary criticism, with its idiosyncratic, personal focus on individual works, can seem self-indulgent, even frivolous. What’s the point, his graphs seem to ask, of continuing to interpret individual books—especially books that have already been interpreted over and over?”