How did new MacArthur “genius grant” winner Viet Thanh Nguyen get where he is now? “A mere 18 months ago, Nguyen was still unknown as a fiction writer. His career began quickly, and seemingly out of nowhere, in April 2015 — when a rave on the cover of The New York Times Book Review made his debut novel, The Sympathizer, one of the year’s most-discussed books.”
Tag: 10.23.17
How Baseball Is An Expression Of Philosophy
“Baseball is the most philosophical of games because, like philosophy at its best, it harmonizes meaning with meticulous analysis. There is no opposition between wonder at the double play, the home run, or the perfect game and the statistical dissection now known as “sabermetrics” (after SABR, the Society for American Baseball Research). In fact, it is the arithmetic and geometry of the game that best disclose its truth. The highest aspiration of philosophy is to be both rigorous and humanistic, to place analytical thought in the service of human values. Baseball shows us that it can be done.”
Someone Left A Noose In The Met Opera’s Locker Room
“[An] orchestra musician found the noose hanging from a pipe [in the men’s musicians’ locker room] at about 7:30 p.m. Saturday – just before the opera’s performance of Turnadot was set to begin. … Police are trying to determine if it was meant to intimidate or target blacks or anyone in particular, cop sources said.”
Why Companies Should Invest In Artists: Self Interest
“Could I be the artist-in-residence to help your team ideate? Could I develop a way of communicating with people to make the workplace a better place?” The role of artists should go beyond just one-off projects, like designing a flier; creatives could have a real impact on the way business is approached and carried through if they are given a supported role within a company.
Major Warhol Collector Says Its Collection Is Being Held “Hostage”
The family that owns the largest private cache of Andy Warhol pieces says its business has been brought to a standstill by a company that’s holding its entire 1,300-plus-piece art collection “hostage” at a New Jersey storage facility.
American Film Institute Turns 50 – It Helped Redefine Movies As Art
“In those days, folks out here [in Los Angeles] were very uncomfortable being called artists, because they were making a lot of money. It seemed brash and inappropriate. It helped that an institution like AFI really provided that context for why this is America’s art form, how much it changed American culture.”
Podcast Behavior: Here’s When People Listen To Their Podcasts
The music streaming giant looked at what a typical day of music and podcast listening looks like for their listeners–and discovered that podcast listening peaked during the middle of the day. Interestingly, when they looked at weekday numbers versus the weekend, people listened to fewer podcasts on the weekend. In fact, the drop off is pretty significant, 45% to be exact.
200 More Women Accuse Director James Toback Of Sexual Abuse
In the two days after the Los Angeles Times reported that 38 women had come forward to allege that Toback had propositioned or harassed them, “more than 200 additional women contacted The Times and, in emails and phone calls, recalled encounters with Toback similar to those detailed in the story.”
Berkshire Museum Cuts List Of Works It’s Planning To Sell In Half
“Carol Bosco Baumann, a spokeswoman for the museum, said that only 19 of the original 40 works will be offered for sale in auctions stretching out into March. ‘Plans for the balance of the deaccessioned works will be shared in due course by Sotheby’s,’ she said in an email to The Eagle.” (The Norman Rockwell paintings whose sale his children have sued to block were not among the works cut.)
In Praise Of The Impersonal Essay (Because Essays Don’t *Have* To Be Personal Confessions)
Laura Miller: “The ‘personal essays’ that have proliferated across the internet on topics ranging from freakish hygiene gaffes to incestuous relationships are often not really essays at all, but short memoirs, confessional narratives whose chief interest lies in the unusually awful or awfully unusual stories they tell, and only secondarily in how those stories are told. … It doesn’t have to be this way! In its less sensational (and, let’s face it, less profitable) form, the essay collection presents its reader with the opportunity to hitch herself to an original mind as it pursues a course plotted by its own idiosyncratic, free-range curiosity.” (For example, David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, Cynthia Ozick, Francis Spufford.)