“In 15th-century China, in 17th-century Europe, name cards, visiting cards, and trade cards – the predecessors to today’s 2″ x 3.5″ business cards – gave people their first chances to construct virtual selves. … But they were always metaphorical entities, too, offering clues to their bearer’s temperament and taste, certifying a person’s value through aesthetics rather than more tangible credentials.”
Tag: 05.25.10
Detecting Sarcasm: Now There’s An App For That
Researchers in Israel “wrote a sentiment-analysing program. They then trained this software to recognise sarcasm by feeding it sentences that had been flagged up by human reviewers as likely to contain sarcasm. … The algorithm agreed with the [human] volunteers 77 per cent of the time for Amazon.com product reviews and 83 per cent of the time for [randomly selected Twitter] tweets.”
Soprano Anneliese Rothenberger, 83
Especially renowned for her Mozart and for Berg’s Lulu, she “sang the world over with the best in the business including in Milan’s La Scala and the Metropolitan Opera in New York … She also had her own television show in Germany and appeared in numerous musical films.”
The Man Who Dares To Update Thai Court Dance
“The story of [Pichet] Klunchun and khon, a form that represents legends, can sound like a legend itself: A misunderstood teenager becomes apprentice to an outcast master, sets himself on a mission of vindication, faces humiliation, takes a journey of self-discovery in a far-off land, and returns home to resistance then triumph and fame.”
Researching Dementia To Write Lion’s Face Libretto
“[A]n elderly man and an elderly woman, neither of whom use language any more, gaze at each other, shaking their simple instruments in time. My first thought is a cliche: music drawing strangers together in the depths. Then the doctor sitting next to me gives me a nudge, and shows me what he has scribbled on the margin of his notes: ‘husband & wife’.”
Reserve Funds Put Chicago’s Lyric Opera In The Black
“The glory days of the company achieving more than 100 percent capacity are gone, but Lyric announced Monday that it it sold 86 percent of its seating capacity for the 2009/10 season and surpassed its $16.6 million fundraising goal.” It also “tapped $2.7 million in reserve funds … to balance its $53 million operating budget.”
Vaclav Havel Gets Back To Playwriting
“Leaving is about the leader of an unspecified country who steps down after many years in power, but Havel insists it’s not autobiographical. He began writing the play in the 1980s, long before the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia. … A neighbor saved an early draft.”
The Intellectuals In Roman Polanski’s Corner
Though “the Polanski Liberation Front is hardly a mass movement in France,” its prominent partisans include more than just outraged film directors. “Several popular philosophers, of the sort the French call intellectuels médiathèques, are carrying Polanski’s banner. The most prominent of them is Bernard-Henri Lévy….”
Remembering Jeanne-Claude
“[Wrapped Reichstag] took quite literally hundreds of people, … It was, for all intents and purposes, a military operation. And I saw that the general in charge of this was not Christo, but Jeanne-Claude. Not for nothing did she grow up in a family that was closely connected to the French government. She combined the intellectual precision of Descartes with the unwavering determination of DeGaulle.”
Fewer Ticket Buyers But More Income On Broadway 2009-10
“Broadway productions grossed a total of $1.02 billion during the 2009-10 season, which officially ended on Sunday, with premium-price tickets for star-driven shows like A Steady Rain, Hamlet and A Little Night Music increasing box office sales in spite of a 3 percent decline in attendance compared to the 2008-09 season.”