“Before he began appearing at film festivals and collecting literary awards, when he was just another resourceful punk from Russia’s rust belt, Vassily Sigarev had a job delivering prostitutes to their customers in the concrete-slab housing blocks of Nizhny Tagil.”
Tag: 07.30.12
How To Program A Computer To Generate Jokes
Zach Weiner walks us through the logic involved – and (until the very end) just about convinces one that it might work.
Mashing Up Shakespeare And Brecht In An Airplane Hangar
For Britain’s ongoing World Shakespeare Festival, National Theatre Wales has set itself up in a former RAF base for a production called Coriolan/us – “an ‘infusion’ of Shakespeare’s study of political and military might with Bertolt Brecht’s Coriolan, his unfinished, heavily leftwing attempt to update the play; translated excerpts will be layered with Shakespeare’s script.”
France’s Unemployment Scheme For Artists Unsustainable, Says Audit
“Known as the intermittents du spectacle system, it has sparked the French arts world’s biggest strikes and most flamboyant street demonstrations whenever a government has sought to scale it down. … Currently 100,000 creative workers benefit from the special unemployment system, but it is running at a huge deficit of around €1bn.”
How Was Social Inequality Born? With Domesticated Horses
“The association between horses and wealth was forged millennia ago. In fact, the first people known to celebrate hierarchies of power, whose inequalities of wealth were integral to their society and culture – the people you could call the first 1 percent – were the first people to ride horses.”
How Did Women’s Gymnastics Become So Graceless And Un-Dance-Like?
“By comparison to the ’80s and ’90s, the last decade’s worth of exercises are high on difficulty and tumbling but low on elegance and refinement. Instead of putting together complete routines, coaches, choreographers, and gymnasts treat the moments between tumbling passes as opportunities to rest, filling them with static poses, ill-timed to the music.”
The ‘Hava Nagila’ Backlash
Yes, for years it was the Jewish-American party tune, heard at numberless weddings and bar mitzvahs. But those years were the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, and now the song is profoundly uncool. Says one mother-of-the-groom, “‘Hava Nagila’ at a wedding is like pouring sour milk on cereal.” An ethnomusicologist calls it “a really crummy little tune” that became “the equivalent of a knish.”
How Networks Are Changing Our Relationships To The World
“Networked individualism is reshaping social interaction as we renegotiate the balance between the one and the many.”
Firings At Alabama Public Television Provole Huge Protests
“The recent firings of two Alabama Public Television executives, ousted over their purported unwillingness to air Christianist historical documentaries, has generated a swelling backlash within the state.”
Jonah Lehrer, Caught Fabricating Quotes From Bob Dylan, Resigns From New Yorker
An investigation in Tablet magazine has found that, in his recent bestseller Imagine: How Creativity Works, Lehrer invented quotes he attributed to Dylan. Publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is recalling the book, and Lehrer has given up his staff writer position at The New Yorker, a post he took just last month.