“Moscow is at least eight times zones away from any city in the contiguous United States. The Russian language has a different alphabet. The floors are raked. The tuition costs more than $20,000 a year. And, well, it’s cold in Moscow. But none of those obstacles stand in the way of American students hell-bent on getting pure Russian training.” Several of those students tell Wendy Perron why it’s all worth it.
Tag: 05.12
Time To Hack The Book Cover (Do You Even See Book Covers On Your E-Book Reader?)
“Digital is forcing our hand back into this classic, holistic book design ethos. An ethos that considers the design of a book in its entirety instead of in pieces. The covers for our digital editions need not yell. Need not sell. Heck, they may very well never been seen. The reality is, entire books need to be treated as covers. Entry points into digital editions aren’t strictly defined and they’re only getting fuzzier.”
Why Is RWA Bristol Claiming A Work Is Newly-Discovered Warhol?
Despite claiming that the work is the “earliest known work by Andy Warhol,” the RWA has so far failed to produce a single Warhol expert who says that the work is authentic.
Has Our Concentration On Diversity In The Arts Killed Its Universality?
“From the 1960s and 70s, arts educationalists promoted the idea that not only was everybody capable of responding to art, but that everybody was an artist. Art education moved away from a focus on craft and skill towards a more ‘attitudinal’ understanding of the creative process: expressing one’s unique subjectivity – or later, ethnic identity – was more important than conforming to traditional aesthetic standards.”
What’s Wrong With American Universities
“Most American colleges now allow ‘virtually unlimited freedom’ to undergraduates to choose what they want to study. Very few ‘tell their students what to think’. Most ‘are unwilling even to tell them what’s worth thinking about’.”
Is America Getting Too Old To Continue To Be Creative?
“One of the constants of human history is that the creation of great art is dominated by the young–the median age of peak accomplishment is forty–and the milieu in which great art is created is surely facilitated by energy, freshness of outlook, optimism, and a sense of open-ended possibilities. We must assume that all of these will be in shorter supply than in the past now that our society is increasingly populated by the old.”
Rethinking How the Blues Survived
“While it is certainly true that the music was forged in part by the legacy of slavery and the insults of Jim Crow, the iconic image of the lone bluesman traveling the road with a guitar strapped to his back is also a story about innovators seizing on expanded opportunities brought about by the commercial and technological advances of the early 1900s.”
How Prizes Are Ruining Poetry
“The sheer number of poets now plying their craft inevitably ensures moderation and safety. The national (or even transnational) demand for a certain kind of prize-winning, “well-crafted” poem–a poem that the New Yorker would see fit to print and that would help its author get one of the “good jobs” advertised by the Association of Writers & Writing Programs–has produced an extraordinary uniformity.”
How The Telephone Shaped The Way We Communicate
Where the world’s wires once hummed with the electrical impulses of people talking, that conversation, in the digital age, has been subsumed by all the other information we are exchanging. “At this point, voice isn’t even a rounding error in network operators’ calculations.”
How The Arts Evolved (Scientifically)
“If ever there was a reason for bringing the humanities and science closer together, it is the need to understand the true nature of the human sensory world, as contrasted with that seen by the rest of life.”