“The budget outlines a new 10 per cent tax on book sales in Newfoundland and Labrador, which would be added to the current five per cent federal GST. … If implemented, Newfoundland and Labrador would become the first province in Canada to have its own tax on books.”
Tag: 04.18.16
Did Rousseau Have ADHD? (Sure Looks Like It)
“In his autobiography, Confessions, the description is clear: ‘To understand the full extent of my delirium at this moment you would have to know how easily my heart is fired by the least thing and with what energy it plunges into imagining the object that attracts it, however worthless this object may sometimes be.'”
Here’s Where This Year’s Presidential Candidates Stand On The Arts
“The choice in November’s general election will no doubt be much clearer when it comes to support for arts, but the current field of two Democrats and three Republicans offers a rainbow of cultural policies. Here’s a rundown of some of the key points from each candidate’s political career.”
How Whit Stillman’s Films Humanized The 1%
“Medieval morality plays had vice; Marxists, the bourgeoisie; and my English professors, dead white males. (They also worried about power, brainchild of Foucault’s bald pate.) But these days, we cross our index fingers in the face of privilege. … No one, however, has done more to humanize poor old two-dimensional Privilege than the filmmaker Whit Stillman. … Unsurprisingly, this seems to trouble his critics.”
Witches Are Back In Popular Culture – And This Could Be Why
The Crucible on Broadway, the film The Witch, the TV series Salem and The Devil You Know — “Just as Arthur Miller pulled McCarthyism from Early Modern American witch obsessions, the applications of witchcraft narratives to the current day are manifold. … So what’s the most globally pervasive contemporary witch hunt you can think of? What forms of radicalism has it helped catalyze?” (The questions are not just rhetorical.)
Are Humans Really Smarter Than Chimps? Not On Everything, And That Drives Some Humans Bananas
Frans de Waal: “We have trouble looking at animal intelligence by itself, always asking, ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the smartest of them all?’ Since there is only one answer that satisfies us, people watching [the chimp] Ayumu’s videotaped performance on the internet couldn’t believe it, saying it must be a hoax. … [Some] American scientists felt they had to go into special training to beat the chimp.” (They failed.)
What It’s Like To Work As A New York Times Obit Writer
“All the writers start from scratch with their sources, calling friends and family caught in the midst of funeral planning, scanning yellowed clippings from the paper’s ‘morgue’ archives, and acting as their own fact checkers in the race against the evening’s deadline.”
James Franco Convinces Jerry Saltz He’s A Real Artist
“In almost four hours of conversation in Los Angeles this winter, the artist and critic met and talked honestly about why the art world has been so hostile to Franco and other celebrities who try to enter it – and what drives Franco to continue, hostility be damned.”
Violinist Breaks Her Foot, Plays Concerto Anyway – Standing Up
“‘It happened at like two o’clock,” she said. ‘I had a soundcheck at four.’ There wasn’t time to go to the doctor, and besides, she was pretty sure what a doctor would say: ‘You need to ice it, and elevate, and medicate: three things I couldn’t do at that moment.'”
A Hard-Hitting Radio Soap Opera For War-Torn Syria
“If the soap was about anywhere other than Syria, you might call the storylines melodramatic, but as the scriptwriter Mahmoud points out, all his plots resonate with Syrians because they’re just hearing their own story.”