Russian Orthodox extremists have demonstrated, made death threats, and even committed arson to protest Matilda, a romantic period film about a ballerina with whom the young Nicholas II had an affair before he married. (The last tsar, now considered a saint and martyr, would of course never have done such a thing.) So director Alexei Uchitel announced that he’s expanding it into a four-part miniseries.
Tag: 11.10.17
Universal Beauty? No Such Thing
“Scientists have struggled to find universals that permanently link our species. Although we come to the table with biological predispositions, a million years of bending, breaking and blending have diversified our species’ preferences. We are the products not only of biological evolution but also of cultural evolution. Although the idea of universal beauty is appealing, it doesn’t capture the multiplicity of creation across place and time. Beauty is not genetically preordained.”
How Tina Brown Revitalized Legendary Magazines
“At Vanity Fair and then at The New Yorker, she expanded readerships. Her editorial appetites were fierce; she raked in news and new writers and cash. Some people found her style unsettling, and her victories did little to alter that judgment. Brown’s legacy remains controversial not because her success is in question but because, for some, too much was lost in her kind of success.”
Reconsidering Susan Sontag – Separating A Legend From Her Work
Sontag the personality has grown so large in death that it threatens to eclipse her work: She is remembered as a narcissist, a pugilist, the enemy of Camille Paglia, and a genius.
France Struggles With How To Make Its Very Gendered Language Gender-Neutral
As anyone who’s studied French knows, there’s no neuter: every noun and adjective is either masculine or feminine, most words for occupations have different forms for men and women, and if there are both, “the masculine prevails over the feminine” (as the rule has it). Now a group of teachers and a publishing house grammar guide are arguing for an end to this rule and its corollaries. Naturally, the Académie Française is not having it.
”Marnie’ Screams For Operatic Treatment,’ Writes Nico Muhly, Who Explains How He Gave It One
In this essay the composer talks about why he and librettist Nicholas Wright worked from Winston Graham’s novel rather than the Hitchcock film, how he set a psychiatrist’s session and a fox hunt for the stage, and how to deploy English National Opera’s chorus. (Favorite line, about “the Marnettes”: “The effect should be as if her inner monologue is actually a warped recording of the Tallis Scholars singing a single chord from an obscure Tudor motet.”)
Why Economists Need The Humanities
Like old-style imperialists, economists assume that other people resemble themselves, regardless of their culture, class or background. Thus, they assume that other people will respond in ways that economists consider rational. They subscribe to the fallacy of an abstract “economic man” — “precultural” person. But, the authors write, people are not organisms first created “and then dipped in some culture, like Achilles in the River Styx. They are cultural from the outset.”
How Did A Valuable Stolen de Kooning End Up In Somebody’s Bedroom?
In 1985, Woman-Ochre was stolen from the University of Arizona Museum of Art during opening hours. Thirty-two years later, the $165-million masterpiece wasn’t discovered tucked away in the mansion of a mafioso or for sale on the black market; it was found hanging demurely behind the bedroom door of an elderly couple in rural New Mexico.
Counterfeiters Are Using AI To Make Better Fakes
It’s not just the news that’s fake anymore but all sorts of media and consumer goods can now be knocked off thanks to AI. From audio tracks and video clips to financial transactions and counterfeit products — even your own handwriting can be mimicked with startling levels of accuracy. But what if we could leverage the same computer systems that created these fakes to reveal them just as easily?
The Impacts Of Artificial Intelligence Are Accelerating Exponentially
“The truth about AI, according to experts such as Ray Kurzweil, is that there’s no part of our lives that won’t be directly affected by it. As individuals we probably won’t notice the changes in real-time, but our dependence on machine learning will increase at exponential rates. The law of accelerating returns is behind the artificial intelligence revolution — and Ray Kurzweil’s predictions.”