“How can a writer situated in one culture communicate its truth to readers in very different places?”
Tag: 04.25.17
England’s State Arts Funder Should Be A ‘Development Agency’, Says Report By Its Bosses
“Arts Council England (ACE) must operate as a development agency and focus on developing financially sustainable arts organisations, a wide-ranging review by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport has concluded. For ACE to fulfil this role, the review presents a series of recommendations …”
‘Hamilton’ Is A More Effective Show Now That Obama Has Left Office, Says Critic
Alyssa Rosenberg: “There’s no question that Hamilton is indelibly associated with the Obama administration.” (Lin-Manuel Miranda gave one of the first public performances of any portion of the show at the White House in 2009.) “But frankly, it was a relief to see [it] with some distance from the Obama era.”
Exploding Two Myths About Vermeer: He Wasn’t A Solitary, Isolated Genius, And His Paintings Aren’t Realistic
Alastair Sooke: “In Vermeer’s day, Delft was anything but a backwater … [and] it is inconceivable that Vermeer was unaware of developments in Dutch art happening elsewhere.” And, says Louvre curator Blaise Ducos, “The verisimilitude of these paintings is high, but the realism is low. They are not like photographs. Rather, they are scenes that are arranged and rearranged.”
‘Margaret Atwood Made a Feminist Out of Me’: 12 Authors on ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’
Mara Wilson, N.K. Jemisin, Sady Doyle, Jenny Han, and others recall their first visits to the Republic of Gilead.
‘National Report Card’ Says U.S. Students Are Stagnating In Music And Art
“The findings come from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, which regularly reports on U.S. student achievement, including math, reading and science. But only three times – in 1997, 2008 and now from 2016 – has it looked at music and visual arts. Overall, the national scores on arts achievement remained flat when compared with 2008, said Peggy Carr, the acting commissioner of NAEP. ‘Granted this is not the best score,” she said, especially when compared with U.S. students’ progress in math.”
A Long-Lost Stravinsky Piece Resurfaces And On First Hearing Alex Ross Is Disappointed. But Then He Listens Again…
Like thousands of other Stravinsky fans, I listened to a live stream of the première, my anticipation heightened by descriptions that the composer had supplied later in life. (He called it “the best of my works before ‘The Firebird,’ and the most advanced in chromatic harmony.”) Like many others, I felt mild disappointment.
Canada Struggles With Cultural Policy In The Age Of The Internet
“I think that we’re trying to have a cultural policy that is adapted to the digital age, whereby you believe in the importance of freedom of the Internet, you believe in the importance of net neutrality,” she said. It sounds nice, but an open Internet fits somewhat awkwardly alongside the existing regime of government support for Canadian culture.
The Human Brain Is A Sort Of Time Machine
Neuroscientist Dean Buonomano argues our brains are “constantly tracking the passage of time, whether it’s circadian rhythms that tell us when to go to sleep, or microsecond calculations that allow us to the hear the difference between ‘They gave her cat-food’ and ‘They gave her cat food.’ In an interview with Science of Us, Buonomano spoke about planning for the future as a basic human activity, the limits of be-here-now mindfulness, and the inherent incompatibility between physicists’ and neuroscientists’ understanding of the nature of time.’
What It Was Like Being A Black, Left-Wing Pundit Facing Bill O’Reilly On Fox News
Rich Benjamin: “Despite my disgust with the format and with Fox [News] in general, I felt that if I could get a sizable slice of O’Reilly’s viewership to think fairly, for a few moments, about undocumented immigrants, corporate wage theft, or police brutality, my time would be well spent. … I could gauge the quality of my performance on The O’Reilly Factor by the response from viewers. When I received no response, I knew my efforts had fallen flat. In other instances, just minutes after wrapping up an appearance, my inbox would be flooded with choice feedback from his fans.”