Tag: 09.20.15

Did Shakespeare Intend Hamlet To Be Fat?

“One does look for a Hamlet that is lean and pensive or, failing that, an action hero like Mel Gibson or Keanu Reeves, who both played the role in the 1990s. … But what if our mental image of Hamlet is wrong? What if the grieving, vengeful prince is actually fat? Just because you’ve never considered the possibility doesn’t mean that Shakespeare scholars haven’t argued about it.”

The Man Whose Typefaces Keep You Going (In More Ways Than One) Is Dead At 87

“[Adrian] Frutiger created some of the most widely used fonts of the 20th century, seen daily in airports, on street signs and in subway stations around the world. … Perhaps [his] most ubiquitous typeface is also the least obtrusive: OCR-B, the optical-character font he designed in 1968, adopted five years later as the world standard” – and now seen at the bottom of everyone’s bank checks.

How Trisha Brown Changed Dance

“She caused a revolution by simply, sweetly, turning to spaces that other dance-makers don’t. But she also caused a revolution in the space of the human body. She rejected the pulled up stance of ballet and the inner torque of Martha Graham. She loved Merce Cunningham’s work but she had no wish for dancing bodies to be so upright. She was going for something else, something more yielding, more off-balance, a way for the energy to flow on unusual paths through the body.”

Machines That Think? Machines That Feel? As A Neurologist, I Am Conflicted

“Uncovering the so-called biology of creativity is big business. FMRI scan aficionados tell us which brain areas light up when someone has a novel idea. Brain wave experts propose electrical patterns specific to originality. Even if these observations pan out, they cannot tell us how to interpret a brilliant chess move arising out of a software glitch. If we are forced to expand our notion of creativity to include random electrical firings, what does that tell us about our highly touted imaginative superiority over a mindless machine?”

As America’s Work Place Becomes More Competitive It Becomes Less Creative

The people who can compete and succeed in this culture are an ever-narrower slice of American society: largely young people who are healthy, and wealthy enough not to have to care for family members. An individual company can of course favor these individuals, as health insurers once did, and then pass them off to other businesses when they become parents or need to tend to their own parents. But this model of winning at all costs reinforces a distinctive American pathology of not making room for caregiving. The result: We hemorrhage talent and hollow out our society.

Avery Fisher Hall Becomes David Geffen Hall – 61 Times

“The letters that spell ‘Avery Fisher Hall’ and ‘Home of the New York Philharmonic’ over the box office windows had already been taken down last week, and some carefully coordinated lobby remodeling was going on. The brass replacement letters were downstairs on a conference table — the 8 3/4-inch capital letters in ‘David Geffen Hall’ are taller than the capitals in ‘Home of the New York Philharmonic’ by 4 3/8 inches.”

C.K. Williams, Who Inspired And Castigated And Cajoled Through Poetry, Dies At 78

“His verse could be, by turns, intensely personal, or public-spirited, taking on the Vietnam War and a long list of social injustices, expressed in hot language. ‘This is fresh meat right mr nixon?’ begins one of his best-known poems, ‘In the Heart of the Beast,’ a response to the fatal shootings of student demonstrators at Kent State University in 1970.”

Los Angeles Times Workers And Readers Would Like The Paper To Be Owned By Angelenos, But That’s Not Happening

“Newsrooms everywhere are given to apocalyptic predictions of their own demise. But more than a dozen current and former Times and Tribune staff members — both in the newsroom and on the business side — suggested that The Times was facing a crisis more dire than any it had previously weathered. It has been battered by cutbacks for so long, they said, that it cannot wait any longer for the company’s strategy, which has shown few signs of working, to bear fruit. It must grow its way to the future, they said, not slash.”