“As an expert on language and literacy development in children, I’ve talked to many immigrant parents who expect their children to grow up bilingual, only to be surprised that they end up as monolingual English speakers. Meanwhile, foreign language learning opportunities for English speakers are limited. Why is the U.S. so bad at producing bilinguals?” Harvard education professor Catherine Snow suggests three reasons, and argues that it doesn’t have to be this way.
Tag: 08.01.17
William Gibson (Who Would Know) Talks About Our Current Cultural Obsession With Dystopias
“This could be a case of consumers of a particular kind of pop culture trying to tell us something, alas. Seriously, what I find far more ominous is how seldom, today, we see the phrase ‘the 22nd century.'”
Why I Want To Build An Art Museum For Las Vegas
Condo developer Uri Vaknin: “Already a world-renowned dining, entertainment and shopping capital, our city is now becoming a cultural hub. The openings of The Smith Center for the Performing Arts, The Mob Museum and the Neon Museum signals a clear move in that direction. Yet, I remain dumbfounded that Las Vegas lacks a world-class art museum.”
Patti Smith Remembers Her Buddy, Sam Shepard, And How She Helped Him Finish His Last Manuscript
“Going over a passage describing the Western landscape, he suddenly looked up and said, ‘I’m sorry I can’t take you there.’ I just smiled, for somehow he had already done just that. Without a word, eyes closed, we tramped through the American desert that rolled out a carpet of many colors – saffron dust, then russet, even the color of green glass, golden greens, and then, suddenly, an almost inhuman blue. Blue sand, I said, filled with wonder. Blue everything, he said, and the songs we sang had a color of their own.”
Dirty Dancing: Choreographer Trajal Harrell Shakes Things (Ahem) Up
“The voguing balls of Harlem, the hoochie koochie dances of rural America, the elaborate, prancing gait of runway models – these aren’t influences that routinely feature in contemporary dance. Yet for the American choreographer Trajal Harrell they’ve proved extraordinarily fertile. … His pieces might feature a man posing semi-naked in a pair of Hermès scarves, a woman encased in a small black cube meticulously removing her swimsuit, or a man in a gaudy oriental skirt, gravely shaking his booty.”
Seattle Voters Reject Sales Tax For Arts
“Proposition 1, which requested a 0.1 percent sales tax – or a penny for every $10 spent – was being rejected by 55 percent of [King County] voters, with 45 percent approving.”
Channeling A Gay Black Avant-Garde (And Crazy) Composer In, Of All Places, The United Arab Emirates
Seph Rodney sees a music-and-video project about the late Julius Eastman at the Sharjah Biennial.
Criticism At A Remove – But Why Does Criticism Have To Stand Apart?
Rita Felski asks what might happen if we looked not “behind the text” but “in front of the text, reflecting on what it unfurls, calls forth, makes possible.” In doing so, she seeks to rehabilitate the validity and importance of what we might call “literary desire”: the force that drives you to reread your favorite book yet again; or to finish that work of genre fiction even when you know the ending; or to press a beloved book awkwardly into a distant acquaintance’s hands in hopes that she, too, will come to love what you love and might one day talk with you about it.
How Design Permeates Our Culture (and Vice Versa)
“We’re all ’80s kids,” said David Dodde, co-owner and designer at House Industries. “We’re not inventing anything, we’re just stealing really well. It’s all about the honesty of the theft. In a way, we’re paying homage.”
Understanding The Arcane Process By Which The MPAA Rates Movies (By Someone Who Used To Do It)
What makes, for example, a woman kissing a man OK for G-viewers, while a man kissing another man is PG or PG-13 worthy? Howard Fridkin rated movies on the MPAA’s rating board for over a decade.