In this Q&A, experts (including Harry Ransom Center Senior Research Curator of Photography Roy Flukinger) discuss the changing landscape of photography in the digital age.
Barcelona bites:Five design studios have been picked to represent the best design talent from Spain’s cultural headquarters, Barcelona.The exhibition is to be hosted by one of the UK’s thriving design hot-spots, Manchester.
Each company and the curator, David Sedgwick, have designed a letter from the exhibition title, BCN-MCR (Barcelona-Manchester). These works double as promotional posters.
The 5 consultancies representing themselves with a distinct letter (above) are: Lo Siento (N), Hey ©, Lamosca (B), Mucho (M). and Mayúscula Brands ®.
But if Jane Austen could see that a world of frantic change was about to supplant the world of peaceful fixity she knew, why then does she allow the spirit of Mansfield, in the figure of Fanny, to triumph over the forces of change, as exemplified by the Crawfords? I think one could put it this way: to a world abandoning itself to the dangers of thoughtless restlessness, Jane Austen is holding up the image of the values of thoughtful rest. Aware that the trend was for more and more people to explore the excitements of personality, she wanted to show how much there was to be said for the ‘heroism of principle’. Mansfield Park is a stoic book in that it speaks for stillness rather than movement, firmness rather than fluidity, arrest rather than change, endurance rather than adventure. In the figure of Fanny it elevates the mind that 'struggles against itself’, as opposed to the ego which indulges its promiscuous potentialities. Fanny is a true heroine because in a turbulent world it is harder to refrain from action than to let energy and impulse run riot.
The Confessions warned some early readers off opium, as De Quincey claimed he intended. “Better, a thousand times better, die than have anything to do with such a Devil’s own drug!” Thomas Carlyle commented after reading the work, while De Quincey’s erstwhile friend and fellow opium addict Samuel Taylor Coleridge insisted that he read the Confessions with “unutterable sorrow…The writer with morbid vanity, makes a boast of what was my misfortune.” But for many other readers, De Quincey’s account of opium was an invitation to experimentation — his drugged highs almost irresistible, and the gothic gloom of his lows even more so. Within months of publication, John Wilson, De Quincey’s closest friend and the lead writer for the powerful Blackwood’s Magazine, heard alarming reports of people recklessly attempting to emulate De Quincey’s drug experiences. “Pray, is it true…that your Confessions have caused about fifty unintentional suicides?” he inquires in a flamboyant Blackwood’s sketch. “I should think not,” the Opium Eater replies indignantly. “I have read of six only; and they rested on no solid foundation.”
Gray argues that it is not consciousness or language that distinguishes us from other animals. They are conscious, too, and they communicate with each other in subtle and complex ways that we are only just beginning to understand. No, the invention of writing was humanity’s real fall and the beginning of the knowledge of good and evil:‘From its humble beginnings as a means of stocktaking and tallying debts, writing gave humans the power to preserve their thoughts and experiences from time. At the same time it has allowed them to invent a world of abstract entities and mistake them for reality. The development of writing has enabled them to construct philosophies in which they no longer belong in the natural world.’
That, according to Gray, was the beginning of all our woe. We invented abstractions that destroyed our peace by persuading us that we do not belong to this world. The great monotheistic religions were the original instruments of this illusion but he believes that the atheist secularism that claims to be supplanting them has fallen for the same illusion.That, according to Gray, was the beginning of all our woe. We invented abstractions that destroyed our peace by persuading us that we do not belong to this world. The great monotheistic religions were the original instruments of this illusion but he believes that the atheist secularism that claims to be supplanting them has fallen for the same illusion.
The Newberry—you may be surprised to learn—has a remarkable collection of musical scores and ephemera. Above, you’ll find three of our most lauded treasures: a handwritten aria by a nine-year-old Mozart (check out that penmanship!); a first edition of Jacopo Peri’s Euridice, considered to be the first extant opera score; and Scott Joplin’s Euphonic Sounds, which brought ragtime into the respectable mainstream.If these musical curios tickle your fancy, be sure to check out this year’s Renaissance Center NEH Summer Institute, “Music and Travel in Europe and the Americas, 1500 - 1800.” The institute, geared toward college and university professors, runs from July 15 to August 9 and includes a $3,300 stipend.
On this day in 1564, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni—the Renaissance painter and sculptor, best known for his frescoes in the Sistine Chapel—passed at 88. Above is a letter to Salvestro da Montaguto, written and signed by Michelangelo in 1545.
The South still attracts the most domestic migrants of any U.S. region. Last year, it boasted six of the top eight states in terms of net domestic migration — Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, South Carolina and Georgia. Texas and Florida alone gained 250,000 net migrants. The top four losers were deep blue New York, Illinois, New Jersey and California.These trends suggest that the South will expand its dominance as the nation’s most populous region. In the 1950s, the South, the Northeast and the Midwest each had about the same number of people. Today the region is almost as populous as the Northeast and the Midwest combined.
Perhaps more importantly, these states are nurturing families, in contrast to the Great Lakes states, the Northeast and California. Texas, for example, has increased its under 10 population by over 17% over the past decade; all the former confederate states, outside of Katrina-ravaged Mississippi and Louisiana, gained between 5% and 10%. On the flip side, under 10 populations declined in Illinois, Michigan, New York and California. Houston, Austin, Dallas, Charlotte, Atlanta and Raleigh also saw their child populations rise by at least twice the 10% rate of the rest country over the past decade while New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston and Chicago areas experienced declines.
What might dolphins be saying with all those clicks and squeaks? Each others’ names, suggests a new study of the so-called signature whistles that dolphins use to identify themselves. Whether the vocalizations should truly be considered names, and whether dolphins call to compatriots in a human-like manner, is contested among scientists, but the results reinforce the possibility. After all, to borrow the argot of animal behavior studies, people often greet friends by copying their individually distinctive vocal signatures. “They use these when they want to reunite with a specific individual,” said biologist Stephanie King of Scotland’s University of St. Andrews. “It’s a friendly, affiliative sign.”