“Scientists have long claimed that our ability with numbers is indeed biologically evolved – that we can count because counting was a useful thing for our brains to be able to do. The hunter-gatherer who could tell which herd or flock of prey was the biggest, or which tree held the most fruit, had a survival advantage over the one who couldn’t. What’s more, other animals show a rudimentary capacity to distinguish differing small quantities of things: two bananas from three, say. Surely it stands to reason, then, that numeracy is adaptive. But is it really?”
Tag: 10.26.17
Sarah Polley’s 20-Year Journey To Adapt Margaret Atwood’s ‘Alias Grace’
“Today, Polley is an auteur whose movies – Away From Her, Take This Waltz, and the autobiographical Stories We Tell – form a sort of three-part meditation on female restlessness, the complexity of long-term relationships, and the slipperiness of memory and truth. But back when she first tried to option the rights to Alias Grace at age 18 – as a well-regarded young actress with no filmmaking experience – Atwood turned her down. “
Re-Tooling Diaghilev’s Most Radical Ballet For 2017
“Parade was advertised as the world’s first cubist ballet – mostly in deference to Picasso’s designs, but also as a way of explaining the comic, disconnected logic of its fairground scenario and the clash of musical styles and found noise (pistol shots, sirens) in Satie’s score. … But for National Dance Company Wales (NDCW), it is Diaghilev’s relation to the Russian revolution that has provided the starting point of its show P.A.R.A.D.E.” Judith Mackrell has a look.
Being Hemingway (No Piece Of Cake)
“Perhaps a man possessed of an ego the size of a hot-air balloon could only subsist within a myth. To keep himself airborne required so much huffing and puffing that inevitably he ran out of breath. He was jealous, insecure, treacherous to his friends, and merciless toward his promoters—no good turn, no matter how good it was, went unpunished—and although he overestimated his talent, he also largely wasted it, which was precisely the charge he had laid against his old pal F. Scott Fitzgerald, who, with The Great Gatsby, surely did write if not the then at least agreat American novel.”
Twelve Great Libraries Reveal Their Oldest Treasures
“The New York Public Library, for instance, has not only cuneiform tablets and ninth-century gospels, but also a Gutenberg Bible and a copy of The Bay Psalm Book, one of the oldest books printed in America. In addition to its own cuneiform tablets and Gutenberg Bible, the Library of Congress holds one of the oldest examples of printing in the world, passages from a Buddhist sutra, printed in A.D. 770, as well as a medieval manuscript from 1150, delightfully titled Exposicio Mistica Super Exod.”
Why We’re Drawn To Doing Good After Emergencies
“When our survival is threatened, we are going to reach out and strengthen our connections with people around us. We show generosity. We show compassion. We show gratitude. These are all emotions that function to connect us with each other.”
Live Theatre Does Not Set The Heart A-Racing Any More Than Cinemacasts Do: Study
“Seeing a play live does not evoke a significantly stronger emotional response than watching it in the cinema, according to a project that monitored theatregoers’ heart rates. Reactions to live theatre, a cinema screening and a filmed, 360-degree virtual reality experience were found to be roughly comparable in a new study of Shakespeare performance.”
Here’s One Broadway Tour Where The Cast Can Make Serious Money
Chris Jones looks at the “exceptional” – in more than one sense – case of the current touring production of Les Miserables, now in Chicago.
When Pierre Boulez Went Electric
Boulez’s goal for the French Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique “was not to replace instrumental with electronic music, but to work so that the two would mingle and, in Boulez’s words, ‘live together like cotton and rayon.'”
One Hundred And Fifty Writers Later, This Guy Has Some Carefully Distilled Advice
First of all, writers, you really are not going to clean the house. Don’t do it. Stop it. “If you’re not making the time to write, no other advice can help you.”