Corona reviews the Kavalier and Klay script by Michael Chabon, and finds it sorely lacking compared to the book. [Spoilers].
Category: Arts and Letters
Suspicion Breeds Confidence.
How to Identify a Terrorist, from the Office of Homeland Security. (Via Quiddity.)
Construction Time Again.
The Lower Manhattan Development Corp. releases six plans for WTC rebuilding. I’d say my favorite is the Memorial Garden (pictured at right), with the Memorial Promenade ranking a close second.
Beren and Luthien Pas de Deux.
Artists and dancers from Butler University have composed and choreographed a Tolkien ballet, The Simaril. (More here.)
Swans and Toddlers.
Gillian gets a very positive review in the NYT for her performance as Odette/Odile (the lead) in Swan Lake over the weekend. No mention is made of the ridiculously bratty kid who was screaming through most of Act II, nor of the overly reactive shushs and gasps of utter disbelief made by most of the ballet cognoscenti at the child’s behavior. Gill and her partner (Jose Carreno) were real troopers through it, though, and it definitely got the crowd even more behind them for the rest of the show.
Blame Business Casual.
Robin Givhan of the Post blames the recent corporate scandals on Dress-Down Fridays. Somehow, I don’t think most of these guys would be any more straight-laced in a power tie.
Struggle in the Ivy.
Are Harvard and Princeton hurting Afro-Am scholarship in their contest over Henry Louis Gates and Cornel West? Hmmm…I don’t really buy it. In my opinion, virtually all the academic disciplines are star-driven with regard to employment. And, while Diaspora Studies may indeed be the most interesting locus of scholarship in this field right now, Gates and West are performing an equally important function in their roles as public intellectuals…a role all too many academics have forsaken. In related news, assorted neocons have used the Summers fracas to blacklist Cornel West. Just like good little orthodoxy-craving neocons to flee at the sound of intelligent opposition, no?
What are you doing, Dave?
Researchers come ever closer to teaching common sense to Cyc, the thinking computer. In 1986 Cyc asked whether it was human. That same year it asked whether any other computers were engaged in such a project. Shades of Douglas Adams‘ Deep Thought.
Harvard jihad.
The jihad furor at Harvard‘s graduation dies down. (The speaker, a fellow with a knack for creating controversy, will undoubtedly go far.) This weekend is also my 5-year reunion up in Cambridge, but I’m bagging it (as are most of my closest friends from the old school.) Maybe I’ll make the tenth.
la soeur mal gardee.
Gill gets props for her premiere in la Fille Mal Gardee last Sunday.