Ancient City Of Teotihuacán Suggests Life Was Pretty Good For Most Residents

Scientists studying the site have been able to present some remarkable theories. For one, we haven’t found any direct evidence of a king. The city’s extensive mural paintings contain no obvious images of royalty, and, to date, no one has found signs of a royal burial under the city’s pyramids. Archaeologists David Carballo at Boston University and Linda Manzanilla at the National Autonomous University of Mexico suggest that this is because Teotihuacán’s government may have been closer to a democracy than a dictatorship: It likely involved shared power, and the people may have had more say in selecting their ruler than in many ancient societies.

Playing Othello As An Out Lesbian General

Says director Gemma Bodinetz, “I wanted to make a modern audience sit up and feel something of what a Jacobean audience must have felt at seeing a black man commanding an army.” Star Golda Rosheuvel: “Some men have a terrible fear of women, particularly powerful women. They would prefer not to see change, and this Othello is part of change. She is a woman who has power over all these men, all that testosterone. How does she negotiate that? Then she goes further and brings her lover – Desdemona – into that arena. It’s a scary thing to do.”

Top Posts From AJBlogs 04.03.18

Post-Racial? Puhleeze!
I recently attended a production of Our Town presented by Triad Stage, a professional theater company based in Greensboro, NC. It had been decades since I had seen the play but I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for it. I thought it was very well done, but this is not a review. What this is … read more
AJBlog: Engaging Matters Published 2018-04-03

Morbid Fascination: The Undead Haunt the Met Breuer’s “Like Life” (with video)
“Ewww, gross!” exclaimed a seasoned critic (not me), disconcerted by one of many creepy, gruesome works that affront delicate sensibilities in the Met Breuer’s Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body (1300–Now), … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2018-04-03

April 3 Birthdays, Scott LaFaro’s Among Them
The Jazz West Coast listserve often begins its posts with the names of jazz people born on the current date. The April 3 list is a profusion of such names. … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2018-04-03

 

Do “Roseanne’s” Big Ratings Mean Anything About The Future Of TV Comedy?

Much of the analysis that followed focused on the show’s politics: Star Roseanne Barr is an eager champion of debunked right-wing conspiracies, and the premiere’s storyline hinged on her character’s support for President Donald Trump. And since the 2016 presidential election, television programmers have been working to find ways to reach working-class whites who voted for Trump. The success of “Roseanne” only reaffirmed those efforts. But looking ahead to 2018-19, “Roseanne” may be a harbinger of a less titillating, more significant programming shift — the revitalization of the broadcast comedy after years of emphasis on drama.

How Does Dance Work Its Magic In a Verbal World?

What is it about dance, a non-verbal art, that allows it to do what words cannot? Is it that it is physical/gestural rather than verbal, or instead that it is characteristically artistic experience rather than everyday discourse? To answer this, we must also consider for comparison the two other possibilities: non-verbal non-art and verbal art (literature/poetry).

Small Study: Virtual Reality Experiences May Boost Creativity

To assess their creativity, all students performed a series of problems from the Alternative Uses Task, a common measure of creative ability in which one is asked to come up with novel uses for a common object. Half came up with offbeat uses as they walked down the virtual corridor (whether or not doing so necessitated breaking down walls), while the others did so immediately afterwards. Either way, “superior creative performance was observed in the ‘break’ condition,” the researchers report. This result supports the thesis that the “bodily experience” of breaking down barriers “would spread to conceptual processing.”

What Distinguishes How Humans Think

How is it that human thought is so deeply different from that of other animals, even though our brains can be quite similar? The difference is due, Andy Clark believes, to our heightened ability to incorporate props and tools into our thinking, to use them to think thoughts we could never have otherwise. If we do not see this, he writes, it is only because we are in the grip of a prejudice—“that whatever matters about my mind must depend solely on what goes on inside my own biological skin-bag, inside the ancient fortress of skin and skull.”