Reviews and News:
The Louvre closes after a man attacked a soldier near the museum’s entrance with a knife.
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Why do we sleep? “This mass downscaling stops neurons from becoming saturated—which may be one of the reasons why sleep exists at all.”
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The man who made science fiction: “Gernsback is sometimes called the father of science fiction, though not because of any he wrote himself…He gave the new genre its name in the 1920s, when he published ‘pulp’ magazines like Amazing Stories and Science Wonder Stories in which eager writers could ply their trade for pennies a word (when he paid them at all)… Gernsback left a trail of technical writings, patents, interviews, newspaper clippings, and prophetic essays, and the best of these have now been gathered into a beautifully illustrated compendium and sourcebook titled The Perversity of Things: Hugo Gernsback on Media, Tinkering, and Scientifiction, by Grant Wythoff, a Columbia University historian of media studies. Wythoff sees his subject as, above all, a ‘tinkerer.’ What is a tinkerer? Edison had used the word ‘mucker.’ A tinkerer or mucker is a scientific experimenter without portfolio, trying not to put on airs.”
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The French origins of think tanks.
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In Case You Missed It:
Bosch and Bruegel: “Almost all the themes that in Bruegel look like ‘genre’ subjects were painted first by Bosch. The difference, and it is a giddying world of difference, is in tone and intent.”
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The poetry, politics, and madness of Ezra Pound.
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In The Millions, Sari Botton writes about the ups and downs of ghostwriting.
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Did Steven Spielberg ruin the movies? No, but what he “can be blamed for, and what the Freud-fuelled Haskell inexplicably skates around, is having infantilised movies and their audiences. If you ever glance at the cinema listings and wonder why there’s nothing the even vaguely mature might want to see, blame Spielberg. Terror of adulthood is his primal theme.”
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Interview: Eric C. Simpson and Jay Nordlinger preview New York’s spring 2017 classical music season.
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Classic Essay: Albert Jay Nock, “The Value of Useless Knowledge”
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