I thought it’d be tough. I thought it’d be hard work. But I also thought I’d be able to do it. I mean, I read quickly. But it was a huge ask. It did just swallow up my year. I got to a point where I was actually dreaming mash-ups of the books I was reading. I would wake up in the morning and go, “Did that happen?”
Tag: 10.15.18
Together in a Shrinking Space
Lucy Guerin Inc performs Guerin’s Split at the Baryshnikov Arts Center,
October 13 through 15.
Scream
My pal went into the Donmar’s Measure for Measure expecting a fight. She’d read that Josie Rourke’s production presents the cut-down text twice. The first, set at the time of Shakespeare’s 1604 premiere, where deputy governor Angelo attempts to coerce soon-to-be-nun Isabella into sex to save her brother’s life. The second, set today – same plot but with a female minister harassing a young man. Pal was having none of it.
M.I.T. Makes A Billion-Dollar Bet On AI, Starting A New College
Massachusetts Institute of Technology is taking a particularly ambitious step, creating a new college backed by a planned investment of $1 billion. Two-thirds of the funds have already been raised, M.I.T. said, in announcing the initiative on Monday. The linchpin gift of $350 million came from Stephen A. Schwarzman, chief executive of the Blackstone Group, the big private equity firm. The college, called the M.I.T. Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing, will create 50 new faculty positions and many more fellowships for graduate students.
Judges Overturn Public Vote In The Guardian’s Not The Booker Prize
Democracy shamocracy, right? “Sweet Fruit, Sour Land by Rebecca Ley is the winner of the 2018 Not the Booker Prize. Our three judges have taken the brave decision to overrule the public vote and put their weight behind this dark dystopian novel in the place of Ariel Kahn’s optimistic and gentle Raising Sparks.”
Australians Are Making Incredible Films, But Sometimes Even Australians Don’t Get To See Them
Whose fault is that? Well … “Many Australian film-makers are locked out of cinemas. Australian producers too often lack the resources to compete with the massive marketing budgets of US films, while Hollywood cinema distributors dominate our screens. Like stocks in supermarkets, the bigger the marketing spend, the greater the shelf space accorded at the local multiplex.”
For Nearly 2,000 Years, The Aeneid Was Europe’s Most Influential Work Of Literature. Why’s It So Uncomfortable Now?
Daniel Mendelsohn: “While our forebears looked confidently to the text of the Aeneid for answers, today it raises troubling questions. … Two thousand years after its appearance, we still can’t decide if [Virgil’s] masterpiece is a regressive celebration of power as a means of political domination or a craftily coded critique of imperial ideology — a work that still has something useful to tell us.”
Daniel Radcliffe Is Playing A Fact-Checker On Broadway, So He Spent A Day Being One At The New Yorker
The magazine’s chief of fact-checking, to Radcliffe: “You have to project confidence, so the person doesn’t start quarrelling with everything that you ask.”
Radcliffe: “I’m more nervous about this than I am about going onstage tonight.”
The Planet Is Dying. So How Do You Write About That?
Hope and its doleful twin, Hopelessness, might be thought of as the co-muses of the modern eco-narrative. Such is the world we’ve created—a world of wounds—that loss is, almost invariably, the nature writer’s subject. The question is how we relate to that loss. Is the glass ninety-five per cent empty or is it five per cent full?