“The challenge of keeping wildlife away from deadly collisions with cars inspired the ARC (for Animal Road Crossing) international design competition, which last year invited dozens of landscape architects from around the world to imagine animal-friendly, and eye-catching, bridges to cross over busy highways.”
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How Pointe Shoes Are Made: An Illustrated Guide
“The block at the front of the toe has to be carefully built up with hessian paper and glue, then finished in an oven where it sits overnight. Depending on the craftsman – the size of their hands, their strength and how they apply the glue – each pointe shoe will have a different feel.”
How Technology Is Easing The Analog Classical Performance
“The digital tide washing over society is lapping at the shores of classical music.”
Choreographing Nutcracker When You Grew Up Without Christmas
Alexei Ratmansky, whose new version for ABT of the ubiquitous holiday ballet is about to premiere, grew up in the Soviet Union, where New Year’s was the big winter holiday and Christmas was barely mentioned, let alone associated with toy soldiers and sugarplums.
Depicting Stutterers in the Movies
The King’s Speech notwithstanding, “filmmakers have advanced their own unhelpful theories of a stutter’s cause and consequence since their earliest opportunity, amounting mostly to cartoon depictions of slapstick ineptitude and a jumble of mistaken assumptions about the disorder: That its sufferers are lily-livered, or ‘girl shy,’ or nervously traumatized. Watch as we torture the son of a bitch!”
A Beethoven of Painting: How Sargy Mann Kept Working As He Went Blind
As he gradually lost his sight to cataracts, Mann kept and even developed his vivid sense of color and light. Today he continues to paint, his canvases sell for thousands of pounds, and he has attracted the keen interest of eminent neurologists.
Birds, Like Humans, Tend Not to Listen to Foreign Accents
“New research suggests that our brains have a built-in bias against people whose accents don’t sound like our own.” Other researchers have “compared songbirds from Pennsylvania with songbirds from New York. They found specific brain cells in the Pennsylvania birds that responded to songs sung in their own accent, but they would stop firing when exposed to a New York accent.”
The Origin of ‘Taps’
“Today we know ‘Taps’ as the solemn melody played by buglers at our military funerals. But that’s not how the simple, 24-note tune got its start.”
Painter Jack Levine, 95, Unrepentant Realist
“Mr. Levine despised abstract art and bucked the art world’s movement toward it … He specialized in satiric tableaus and sharp social commentary directed at big business, political corruption, militarism and racism, with something left over for the comic spectacle of the human race on parade.”
Old Lower East Side Synagogue Gets New Kiki Smith Window
“Earlier this month the Museum at Eldridge Street unveiled a new stained-glass window designed by the artist Kiki Smith and the architect Deborah Gans for its 1887 synagogue, which re-opened in 2007 after a 20-year restoration.”