“BookGlutton.com, a Web site that permits readers to chat about books as they read, may be transforming a lone activity into a communal one. The site was born out of co-founder Travis Alber’s desire to talk about books with friends who had moved away. Her solution? A Web site that allows multiple users to write in the margins of an online book.”
Tag: 07.02.09
Dublin’s Abbey Theatre To Present Folk-Rock Yeats
“Yeats is coming back to the Abbey, but not as we might expect him. The [Celtic rock band the] Waterboys will perform a series of five concerts at the national theatre around St Patrick’s Day, with frontman Mike Scott, Irish fiddler Steve Wickham and guest musicians performing An Appointment with Mr Yeats, combining the poetry of Yeats with the passion of the Waterboys’ music.”
Why We Say Things We Don’t Want To, A Scientific Explanation
“Using ingenious experiments to reveal the brain’s hidden machinations, Wegner and others have found that our brains expend steady, conscious effort to avoid talking about ex-girlfriends on first dates, sending putts off the green, or letting slip the real reason you were late for work. But when our conscious minds are stressed and preoccupied — by, for example, a desire not to screw up — a subconscious process devoted to guarding against the mistake slips through. Unwanted thoughts pop into the forefront of your mind.”
Theatre Artists Weigh In On Gender Bias
“Not that there shouldn’t be more opportunities for women to run institutions, but institutions with women at the helm don’t fare any better than those run by men in terms of producing women. There are a lot of great scripts out there by women that just aren’t making it on to the boards.”
YouTube Stardom – I Coulda Been A Contenda (Or Could I?)
“This is the great promise of YouTube: Your video can soar in popularity through sheer word-of mouth–or rather, click-of-mouth–until eventually people are making T-shirts about it. No one ever said this was going to happen for everyone. So, what are your chances of achieving YouTube stardom?”
Italy Shows Off Looted Art Returned By Cleveland Musseum
“It’s the latest success for Italy in its campaign to recover artifacts stolen from ancient sites and smuggled out of the country to be sold. The Cleveland Museum had bought the artifacts in the 1970s and 1980s and said it had no knowledge about the tainted past of the artifacts until contacted by Italian authorities.”
First “living Statue” In Trafalgar Square Is A Housewife
“I wanted to be able to represent normal, everyday stay-at-home mums who aren’t normally a feature of major artworks – to show my kids now, and when they’re older, that you can do, and be part of anything, no matter how ordinary you are or feel. I never expected to get a place so hadn’t thought about what to do and I never expected to be first.”
Freedom By Any Other Definition Of Culture
“Does the notion of ‘freedom’ really mean the same thing in Baghdad as it does in Boston? Newly published research suggests the answer is probably no. It’s a question of whether one is more oriented toward independence or interdependence — an attitude that is largely conditioned by one’s cultural background.”
Karl Malden, 97
The Everyman actor, who earned cinematic acclaim in A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront as well as television stardom in The Streets of San Francisco and decades of American Express commercials, said, “I learned in my second year of drama school that I was not a leading man – I was a character actor. So I thought, I’d better be the best character actor around.”
How The Lilacs Bloom’d In The Dooryard
Robert Roper considers how Walt Whitman’s experiences of volunteering in Civil War hospitals, and of writing letters of condolence to the families of newly-dead soldiers, helped shape “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” his elegy for Abraham Lincoln.