A public art project - Prismatic Park - makes Madison Square Park an interactive dance experience. One of the choreographers: "I tell the dancers, 'You’re going to be confronted by people, a squirrel is going to run by, you’re going to stop to say hello to your boyfriend — all of that is what we’re doing.'"
Kristen Arnett: "Florida is no place for those who want to view it from a safe distance. This state is invasive, creeping, needy. Hardy and scrabbling, our peninsula's sour with poison and rot and choking vines. You fight for the right to live in its greenery, and once you've finally carved out a space, you stay tangled in the wreck. Once you've left, there’s no coming back. The best you can do is hack out a different life somewhere else. This place isn't yours to write about. It's barely mine."
Yep. They're more likely than Gen-X and Boomers - and way more likely than the Silent Generation - to visit the library. Maybe this is why? "Due in large part to libraries’ egalitarian nature, their events, teach-ins, and classes are free and open, making them natural hubs for underemployed millennials seeking skills to break out of their parents’ homes." Also, of course, the books are free.
"British artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey ... are elevating grass into something quite beautiful. They have been creating large-scale canvases of living grass, by tinkering with the natural growth process of this little plant in order to create impressive, photographic-like images." (includes video)
After Williams' star turn as Omar made him a celebrity in East Flatbush, "what followed was something of an existential crisis. Months removed from filming, Mr. Williams struggled to shake the grave psyche of his character. He was racked by doubts both personal and political: Had he lost hold of his identity? Was he glorifying the ills of his community, or exposing their roots? He couldn’t divine the answers."
"Earlier folklorists had focused on black religious expression, the language of the church and pulpit. Mr. Abrahams described a new and vibrant verbal world, exuberant, profane and endlessly inventive. He explained the fine points of the dozens - a street-corner battle of wits in which participants traded insults ... [as well as] jump-rope rhymes and counting rhymes."
Used to be, you could go to a movie without having to rifle back through books, check out Wikipedia entries, and maybe do a rewatch of the whole canon so far. Not so now. "Sequels and remakes have been around for more than a century, but the past decade has seen their takeover of the multiplex (in most of America, the only kind of theater around) — and a corresponding rise in the exclusionary nature of mainstream film culture."
Kat Eschner tells the story of cobalt and the many shades of blue pigment that the element made achievable and affordable (no more finding and grinding lapis lazuli!).
The theory (backed up with statistics): "British people are more liberal on such issues as same-sex relationships and abortion than they have ever been. At the last count, one in 10 people in couples in England and Wales were in what the official statistics call an 'inter-ethnic relationship.' Cannabis smoke regularly wafts around our town and city centres; Glastonbury is as much a part of the national calendar as Wimbledon or the Grand National. And throughout our waking hours, there is one constant above all others: what the dictionary still calls pop music, probably the most potent means of communication human beings have ever come up with."
The literary culture of al-Andalus, Arab-ruled Spain in the Middle Ages, was as splendid as its architecture - and much of the era's poetry was destroyed when the Inquisition burned the library at Granada in 1499. But there were Jewish Andalusian writers in the 10th and 11th centuries who adopted the poetic forms and subjects used by their Arab colleagues, and much of that work survives. Benjamin Ramm tells us about the most admired of these writers and offers samples of their verse.
The board of governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences “left intact Rule Two, the one that established that a film” — in...
