Tony Perrottet gives a brief tour of leases and land sales down the centuries, from the world’s oldest lease (a 4,000-year-old Babylonian clay tablet), through the first professional real estate agents (in ancient Rome, where they were called extractores), to the reason so many American writers and artists could afford to live in 1920s Paris.
Tag: 06.18.10
Polish National Museum Staff Revolts Against Director
“The main points of contention are [Piotr] Piotrowski’s exhibition programme, which is seen as too contemporary, and his restructuring proposals, which include redundancies. … The protest coincides with the opening of the museum’s controversial ‘Ars Homo Erotica’ exhibition, a survey of homoerotic art from antiquity to the present.”
DC’s Arena Stage Hires Playwrights As Employees
“Over the next three years, five playwrights will be part of Arena’s American Voices New Play Institute, which was formed in August and financed by a $1.1 million gift…. The writers will be paid to write on any project they please during their three-year tenure, with the promise of a stage production and an additional pot of development money under their control.”
Does The Internet Offer A Utopian Future?
“Yes, a wired future might look good for democracy if some of the social functions currently performed by traditional media are taken up by new Internet projects. But that outcome needs to be demonstrated–perhaps constructively aimed at–rather than assumed. For populists such as Clay Shirky, the need for considered political commitment does not even merit discussion. The triathlon must go on, even if the athletes become brainwashed and bigoted.”
Calculating Theatre’s Carbon Footprint
“Moving sets, transporting casts and lighting hotel rooms for British touring theatre companies creates as many greenhouse gas emissions every year as flying around the world 2,680 times, new research has revealed.”
Do We Need A Slow Reading Movement?
“At a time when people spend much of their time skimming websites, text messages and e-mails, an English professor at the University of New Hampshire is making the case for slowing down as a way to gain more meaning and pleasure out of the written word.”
Study: Practice Won’t Make You A Better Sightreader
“In the researchers’ investigation, the best sight readers combined strong working memories with tens of thousands of hours of piano practice over several decades. Working memory appears to be a capacity that gels early in life and can’t be improved much by learning, the study suggests.”
Novelist José Saramago, 87
The Portuguese novelist José Saramago, who explored Portugal’s troubled political identity in a series of novels published over the last four decades, won the Nobel prize for literature in 1998.
What Happens When You Compare Translations Of Books
“While conceding there are no whopping discrepancies of meaning in our translations, he has gleefully divulged the following piece of data: ‘Of the 56 sentences in the story, there is precisely one which is rendered just the same by both translators. That one sentence, incidentally, is the line of dialogue that goes: “Really?”‘”
Will UK Funding Cuts Kill Small Theatres?
“British theatre has never been a level playing field and smaller organisations will be more badly affected than big players such as the National and the RSC, for whom the loss of £99,000 and £80,000 respectively – while not insubstantial – won’t cause too much damage.”