Brain researchers for the first time claim to have found a method for improving the general problem-solving ability scientists call fluid intelligence, otherwise known as “smarts.”
Tag: 04.28.08
Richard Greenberg’s New The Injured Party Bows
At California’s South Coast Rep. “The storytelling, which dips and dissolves in plot points too numerous and odd to synopsize, has an inventiveness that recalls the uncategorizable literary exploits of Jane Bowles. Greenberg’s play isn’t simply forging a nontraditional dramatic path but eddying in its own delightful contrivances.”
Richard Greenberg Talks About His New Play
“One of the appealing ways of working, for me … is making something that’s almost algebraic – something highly formal with sharply etched incongruities. But in this play, I just decided to sprawl. I wanted it to go off in all directions. I didn’t want the factor of formal elegance to creep in.”
How A Sci-Fi 1950s Comic Influenced Today’s British Architecture
“It was architecture – not the main concern of the Science Museum show – that was actually most influenced by the Dan Dare dream of a futuristic Britain. Not only were the strips pacy, patriotic reads, they were astonishing in terms of their architectural prescience. Hampson pushed design boundaries, showing how a bowler-hat, pinstripe Britain could endure quite happily in a future world of atomic-era design. His imaginings were eagerly lapped up by some of the youngsters who would go on to create Britain’s highly regarded school of hi-tech, space-age influenced architecture.”
Fake Documents Derail Much Anticipated Bio
On the eve of publishing a new biography of Louis XIV’s mistress, the volume is withdrawn. It seems that part of the book was based on a document long debunked as a hoax…
Are Writers Leaving Publisher Over JK Rowling Treatment?
Bloomsbury, the publishing house behind the Harry Potter phenomenon, is facing a growing revolt from some of its leading authors upset by its “obsession” with JK Rowling.
Opera Is The Hot Ticket In London These Days
“In 40 years of opera-going in London I cannot remember a moment when new work was so hot except, perhaps, the double world-premiere week in May 1986. I remember people running from one to the other proclaiming, like believers at Easter, ‘Opera is risen!’ Such visions can be illusory. There was no general resurrection of opera after the mid-1980s and there is unlikely to be one now.”
Broadcaster Humphrey Lyttleton, 86
Lyttelton will leave an enormous gap not just in British cultural life as a whole but in the lives of many millions of listeners,” BBC Director-General Mark Thompson said in a statement today. “One of the towering figures of British jazz, he excelled too as a writer, cartoonist, humorist and, of course, as a broadcaster.”
NY Ballet Competition Gets A New Director
Richard Chen See is the new director of the New York International Ballet Competition. Chen See is a 14-year veteran of the Paul Taylor Dance Company.
James Frey’s New Foray Into Publishing A Novel
Memoirist James Frey has a novel coming out next month, and it’s a safe bet that Oprah Winfrey won’t be selecting it for her book club. Frey’s fudging of facts in his best-selling memoir got him in trouble in the publishing world. So his plan for the new book? Promotion in “non-traditional” venues…