“Once a community decision has been made about a controversial monument, officials often have to deal with public preservation laws designed to impede the removal of historic monuments. Efforts to remove statues in places like Baltimore and Memphis have proven no more straightforward than what happened in Demopolis, Alabama.”
Tag: 04.24.18
It Used To Be Possible To Know Anything. Here’s The Last Man Who Pulled It Off
It hardly seems likely that the life of an obscure Anglican clergyman should recommend itself to the attention of a modern biographer; the shelves of second-hand bookshops are the sepulchers of many an Essex parson’s dutifully compiled Life and Letters. But Sabine Baring-Gould happens to have been the last man who knew everything.
Libraries Are Messy, Flawed Human Places
If Stuart Kells wants to show that libraries are human places, he has also chosen stories that reveal their venal side. His librarians can be thieves, hoarders, or shameful caretakers. Even when they love books, they can’t be trusted with them. In its ideal form, a library protects books, celebrates them, and also makes them available to a wide group of readers. In this history, any single library rarely achieves all of these goals at once.
Marvel’s Avengers Movies Have Begun Subverting Their Own Ideas About Superheroism
“After kicking things off with stirring origin movies like Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America: The First Avenger, the series has gradually started to examine the shaky underpinnings of its heroic Avengers, and is now laying the groundwork for their calamitous upending.”
Donmar Warehouse’s ‘Measure For Measure’ Has Male And Female Leads Switching Roles
“Often seen as one of Shakespeare’s ‘problem plays’, the plot centres on Angelo, a puritan hardliner on a mission to clean up the city he is put in charge of, and the sister of a man he sentences to death, Isabella. After pleading for her brother, Angelo offers to save him in return for sex. … The role swap will probably take place about halfway through, with some scenes being replayed, including the key moment when Angelo makes the offer to Isabella.”
Encounters With Shakespeare: 15 ‘New Yorker’ Writers On When The Bard Blew Them Away
“On the occasion of the four-hundredth anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death, New Yorker writers” – Elif Batuman, Richard Brody, Larissa MacFarquhar, Vinson Cunningham, Rebecca Mead, Philip Gourevitch, Louis Menand, and others – “share their experiences of reading, watching, studying, performing, memorizing, and falling in love with the work of the Bard.”
Cleveland Orchestra Takes On Third Out-Of-Town Residency
“On Tuesday, the orchestra announced a new residency at the Baldwin Wallace University Conservatory of Music, one similar to those it conducts at Indiana University and in Miami. The project marks the orchestra’s first formal collaboration with the school.”
A Frank Discussion About What Arts Get Funded
I think that arts funding applications can become far too much like box-ticking. Companies are trying to present what they think the Arts Council wants – and some people are just better at it than others.
How Poetry And Math Are Alike
Mathematics and poetry are both “formats that can convey multiple meanings.” In mathematics, a single object or idea might take different forms. A quadratic equation, for example, can be understood in terms of its algebraic expression, perhaps y=x2+3x-7, or in terms of its graph, a parabola. Henri Poincaré, a French polymath who laid the foundations of two different fields of mathematics in the early 1900s, described mathematics as “the art of giving the same name to different things.” Likewise, poets create layers of meaning by utilizing words and images that have multiple interpretations and associations. Both mathematicians and poets strive for economy and precision, selecting exactly the words they need to convey their meaning.
Well-Known Student Loan Expert Turns Out To Be A Fraud
After The Chronicle spent more than a week trying to verify Drew Cloud’s existence, the company that owns The Student Loan Report confirmed that Cloud was fake. “Drew Cloud is a pseudonym that a diverse group of authors at Student Loan Report, LLC use to share experiences and information related to the challenges college students face with funding their education,” wrote Nate Matherson, CEO of LendEDU. Before that admission, however, Cloud had corresponded at length with many journalists, pitching them stories and offering email interviews, many of which were published.