How To Steal A Monastery: When American Robber Barons Brought Medieval Landmarks Over From Europe, Stone By Stone

“American robber barons snuck ancient stones out of the war-torn countryside in the dead of night, Europeans fretted over how their familiar landmarks were rapidly disappearing, and U.S. cities spent decades of the 20th century fighting over what to do with tens of thousands of displaced medieval remnants.”

Japanese Curator Denied Visa To US

Fram Kitagawa, the “redoubtable” Japanese curator who espouses art’s return to slow, rural values as opposed to urban, market systems, has been denied a visa by US officials, he said, according to a press release from the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington.

This Book Was Voted The Most Influential Academic Text In History

“After a list of the top 20 academic books was pulled together by expert academic booksellers, librarians and publishers …, the public was asked to vote on what they believed to be the most influential.” The winner – a volume arguably at the very heart of America’s culture wars – finished well ahead of Marx’s Communist Manifesto, the complete works of Shakespeare, Plato’s The Republic, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and Smith’s The Wealth of Nations.

How The Metaphor Of ‘The Cloud’ Changed Our Attitude Toward The Internet

“Around 2010, casual Internet users were introduced to the idea that the digital world around them could be understood in terms of the ‘cloud.’ As a metaphor, the cloud seems easy to grasp: our data is somewhere in the ether, floating, drifting and wireless, available wherever and whenever we need it. … [Yet] how did we come to place our faith in a symbol that is so ephemeral – all vapor and crystal?”

Bolshoi’s Chief Troublemaker Took Over St. Petersburg’s Top Ballet School – And It’s Turned Out Surprisingly Well

The appointment of Nikolai Tsiskaridze to the directorship of the Vaganova Academy (after the Bolshoi Ballet’s management declined to renew his contract) “was controversial at the time, and many high ranking dancers and administrators spoke out against the Bolshoi dancer being given the top job at the Mariinsky school, a school that he hadn’t come through himself. However, after two years the consensus seems to be that he is doing a good job and is popular both inside and outside the revered Academy’s walls.”