The Man Who Acted With Orson Welles, Produced Alfred Hitchcock, Played Tennis With Arnold Schoenberg’s Son, And Watched Hanns Eisler Pass Out

Alex Ross: “One morning last May, I walked up a driveway in Mandeville Canyon, on the west side of Los Angeles, and stepped back nearly eight decades in time. I had entered the home of the actor and director Norman Lloyd, who turned a hundred and one on November 8th.” (includes audio interview)

Teaching Kids To Choreograph – Even Five-Year-Olds

“[Ellen Robbins] has been teaching modern dance to children as young as 5 since the 1970s. She has a knack for tapping into the creativity of her students while painlessly introducing the rudiments of music theory and compositional structure … Even the 5-year-olds are given a chance to make up their own dances. By the time they are teenagers, they’re composing multipart group works.”

When You’re Messing About In The Library And Stumble Across A First Edition King James Bible

“Brian Shetler, a doctoral candidate in book history who works in the library, discovered the Bible when he was hunting through the rare-book shelves, pulling a sampling of 17th-century books printed in England to show to a history class. It was in a box with a label mentioning ‘Bible,’ ‘1611’ and ‘R. Barker,’ a seeming reference to the London printer Robert Barker.”

The Women Of ‘Star Wars’

“In the ‘Star Wars’ marketing machine, Rey sits front and center in the Drew Struzan posters like a yin and yang symbol, holding the balance between the dark and the light side. Where she’ll fall in this world we’re not certain, but we do know that her main priority in the film isn’t political reformation or treaties with the Trade Federation.”

Why Wally Lamb’s Next Novel Is Only Going To Be Available As An App

“There are obvious downsides to releasing a book exclusively as an app. ‘I’ll Take You There’ won’t be available in bookstores or even from e-book retailers like Amazon or Barnes & Noble when it comes out next spring. Instead, Mr. Lamb’s fans will have to buy it from the iTunes app store, and it will work only on Apple devices. Mr. Lamb said that as a music and film lover, he was excited by the prospect of enhancing a narrative with music, film clips and video.”

Composer Ryuichi Sakamoto Talks About Cancer, Writing For Movies, And Revenge

“The difference between European and Japanese music is that there is almost no common element, there is nothing shared between them. It’s a very different system. Like languages: the Japanese language is so far away from the European languages. When we see European languages—even English and French—they share 50,000 vocabulary words between them, but compared to the distance of all the European languages and Japanese language, it’s so far away. It’s the same with music. Very different.”