How Learning The Tango Taught A Man To Walk Again
After a few months of “dancing” in a close embrace, Gabriella Condrea started to slowly pull away from Tho Nguyen so he could stand for a little while on his own, his posture primed and his confidence up. It took just over a year, but one day when Condrea pulled away, Nguyen looked at her and said, “Watch this,” then took three steps without support. It was the first time he had done so in 20 years.
Jawn – The History Of Philadelphia’s Strangest Word
“The word ‘jawn’ is unlike any other English word. In fact, according to the experts that I spoke to, it’s unlike any other word in any other language. It is an all-purpose noun, a stand-in for inanimate objects, abstract concepts, events, places, individual people, and groups of people. It is a completely acceptable statement in Philadelphia to ask someone to ‘remember to bring that jawn to the jawn.'”
The Man Who Made The Study Of Language Cool
“Noam Chomsky is the man who revolutionised linguistics. Since he wrote “Syntactic Structures” in 1957, Mr Chomsky has argued that human language is fundamentally different from any other kind of communication, that a “linguist from Mars” would agree that all human languages are variations on a single language, and that children’s incredibly quick and successful learning (despite often messy and inattentive parental input) points to an innate language faculty in the brain. These ideas are now widely accepted.”
If We’re Honest, We’re All Agnostics In A Way
“Belief without doubt would not be required by an all-loving God, and it should not be worn as a badge of honor. … Anyone who does not occasionally worry that he may be a fraud almost certainly is. Nor does the worry absolve one from the charge; one may still be a fraud, just one who rightly worries about it on occasion. Likewise, anyone who does not occasionally worry that she is wrong about the existence or nonexistence of God most likely has a fraudulent belief.”
Different Mindset: Young People Working In Arts And Technology
“The apparent result of such fluidity is that these young professionals work in technology, do research, and make art, seemingly moving from one to the other without any angst or difficulty. Contrast this with my generation of practitioners, who merely struggled with how to make a living as an artist.”
‘Blue Velvet’ At 30 – Still Shocking After All These Years
Dennis Lim: ” The shock of the new fades by definition, but if it has hardly done so in the case of Blue Velvet, that may be because its tone remains forever elusive. To peruse the early reviews is to sense the emergence of the slipperiest of sensibilities, one that no one quite knew how to talk about. To encounter or revisit the film now, decades later, is to realize that we still don’t.”
Google’s Machines Are Making Art. Will They Also Change Art?
“Developed at Google’s Zurich office in 2014 and released to the wider world last summer, Deep Dream uses artificial neural networks, a style of computing inspired by the brain and nervous systems, to learn to recognise shapes in pictures.”
New Report: Here Are America’s “Most Vibrant” Arts Cities (Ranking)
“To assess arts vibrancy across America, we incorporate four measures each under three main rubrics: demand, supply and public support for arts and culture on a per capita basis.”
Whatever Happened To Philip Glass’s Plans For A Big Cultural Center In Big Sur?
Glass’s concept of a Center is to “gather the world’s leaders in the fields of art, science, and the environment for a broad array of interdisciplinary activities including performances, seminars, and education programs that inspire and motivate the public to become engaged with matters vital to the future of the natural environment and the quality of human existence.”
William Randolph Hearst Really Did Try To Ruin Orson Welles
“Previously unpublished documents have revealed the scale of a plot by the media mogul William Randolph Hearst to discredit Orson Welles and destroy Citizen Kane, the 1941 film about the rise and fall of the fictional newspaper proprietor Charles Foster Kane.”
First: A Broadway Play’s All-Female Creative Team
“Women in one creative role, let alone four, are still relatively rare on Broadway. Over the last 41 seasons of Broadway musicals, only about 1 in 10 directors, authors or composers, and 1 in 4 choreographers, have been female. By contrast, 255 musicals, or 52 percent, have had four men in their top creative roles.”
The State Of Palmyra’s Great Ruins After ISIS Fled
“There remained little hope for the heritage site amid fears that if ISIS ever retreated, its militants would rig bombs to the ruins as they fled.”
Gary Shteyngart Remembers A Surprise Trip With His Hero, Garry Shandling
“And then I looked at the empty seat next to me and it dawned on me. My seatmate for the next six hours was going to be the man whose hair style I had tried to copy through most of high school, with much hair mousse and little success. The man I wanted to be if I ever grew up, because he made people laugh while he told them the truth, which, back in the late eighties and early nineties, was still a novelty.”
As Machines Become Smarter, Will We Get A Universal Translator? (Here’s Why It’s Difficult)
“It’s so difficult for computers because translation doesn’t—or shouldn’t—involve simply translating words, sentences or paragraphs. Rather, it’s about translating meaning. And in order to infer meaning from a specific utterance, humans have to interpret a multitude of elements at the same time.”
Can Broadway Musicals Get Brave?
Despite Hamilton and Fun Home, “the season to come – with its promised jukebox musicals, revivals, and adaptations of television shows and films – suggests that most producers are still playing it safe. … Why has [the genre] been so slow to change? And what can writers, directors and producers do to productively shake up the form?” Alexis Soloski sees some hope.
Critics Hated “Batman V Superman” But It’s A Box Office Smash. So Who Cares About Critics? They Don’t Matter
“The results are a devastating rebuke to the power of mainstream American critics at a time when many newspapers have already outsourced their reviews to wire services and the rise of bloggers has de-professionalized the practice of assessing a film’s attributes and demerits.”
So The Public Disagrees With Critics? Sorry, But It Doesn’t Matter (And That’s Not How Criticism Works)
“Why this apparently overwhelming, unquenchable urge to argue that box office receipts prove the irrelevance and impotence of criticism? Could it be that the movie business feels defensive, maybe even ashamed, of peddling so much profitable dreck, and—whatever the numbers may say—a critic’s reproaches still have the power to sting?”
Bosch’s Hometown Gets In The Spirit For His 500th Anniversary
“The Dutch city of ‘s-Hertogenbosch is as unlike Hell as a place could be. … But this month, in honor of the five hundredth anniversary of his death, a major exhibition at the Noordbrabants Museum and several citywide celebrations of Bosch’s work have studded the innocuous landscape of his home town with tributes to the infernal bacchanals he depicted.”
The Best Part Of Easter? Satan And The Harrowing Of Hell
Molly McArdle explains how medieval images of the Devil, and of the time between the Cruicifixion and the Resurrection, helped her finally make sense of the Catholic faith in which she’d grown up.
‘Conductrix’ – It’s Like ‘Guitar Hero’ For An Entire Orchestra
Co-creator Eimear Noone: “I thought, what if you could create a virtual experience where people could experience what I feel and see on the podium, the high I get when the main theme from Zelda kicks in?”
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Parrots Got Rhythm – And So Do Elephants, Sea Lions, Bonobos And Other Critters
Studies of Snowball the dancing cockatoo (who had a round of television fame in the late ’00s) “turned out to be just the prelude to a new concerto of research on musicality in the animal kingdom. In recent years, scientists have tested various species and found evidence that nonvocal learners such as sea lions and bonobos have rhythm too. In parallel, pioneering studies have begun to elucidate how the brain tracks a beat.”
Andris Nelsons Talks Shostakovich, The Boston Symphony, And New American Music
“Some composers are more interested in composition itself, just to find a different technique, which is also interesting, but [I want to know] how does it express what’s happening in life? Contemporary music, in that sense, to me is very important.”
ISIS Is Driven From Palmyra; Archaeologists Think Some Of The Destruction Can Be Reversed
“Syrian troops on Sunday regained Palmyra, and for the first time since May 2015, when ISIS took the city famed for its 2,000-year-old temples and Greco-Roman ruins, the extent of damage inside the UNESCO World Heritage Site became apparent. ‘We were expecting the worst,’ Maamoun Abdulkarim, Syria’s antiquities chief, [said]. ‘But the landscape, in general, is in good shape.'”
Fort Worth Symphony Musicians Occupy Management’s Offices
“Fort Worth Symphony musicians staged a sit-in at symphony offices near Bass Hall on Thursday after management canceled upcoming contract negotiation meetings, they said. Symphony management and union representatives met earlier this month and had agreed to additional meetings over the next two weeks. However, the meetings were canceled without being rescheduled.”
Library Scofflaws – Why Some Get Fined, Some Get Forgiven, And Some Get Arrested
“Over the years, libraries have fined patrons for not bringing back books and offered no-questions-asked return periods. They’ve published the names of book scofflaws in local newspapers. They’ve paid personal calls on people who hold onto books past their due dates, and even sicced the police on particularly recalcitrant readers. And they still don’t really know how to get their books back.”
When Julie Kent Runs Washington Ballet, She’ll Actually Have A Lighter Schedule Than Before
“The new job’s best perk: weekends. She and [husband Victor] Barbee will work Monday through Friday for the first time in their professional lives. (ABT’s workweek is Tuesday-Saturday, meaning Sunday is the only day the family has together.) Their workdays will end at 6 p.m., rather than at 7 with ABT. The two [currently] travel separately some 10 weeks of the year – she to audition students, he to accompany ABT on tour – meaning more splintering of the family.”
How Should The National African American Museum Handle Bill Cosby?
Not the way it’s been planning to, say accusers.
A Tenor’s Rare Met Encore And What It Means
“We did five performances and right from the first one you could actually see what was happening with the public,” he says. “And as we say in the theater, ‘What the public demands, you give.'”