No man can hinder our private addresses to God; every man can build a chapel in his breast, himself the priest, his heart the sacrifice, and the earth he treads on, the altar.
— Jeremy Taylor, who died in 1667
Yiddish folktale The Dybbuk is reimagined as a theatrical exorcism in new all-female version
When playwright and folklorist S. Ansky travelled around Russia in 1912 to visit Jewish shtetls and gather songs, books and stories (including tales of Kabbalah, or Jewish mysticism), it would have seemed unfathomable to him that more than 100 years later, in a little theatre across the globe, these stories would still be told...
Dybbuk is] the soul of the person who's died, that's unresolved and it lingers and then tries to enter a living person and clings to them in order to communicate through them," explains theatre-maker Samara Hersch.
In Ansky's play, the Dybbuk was the spirit of Leah's beloved: Channon, a poor man who had died upon learning of Leah's impending nuptials to another.
"It's sort of Romeo and Juliet meets Kabbalah and mysticism," quips Hersch
Sergey Roldugin
Bahamas guitarist Joseph Spence (New Yorker)
The book really is better than the movie: a study of 17 books versus their 2018 adaptations.
↩︎ Book Marks
Bitcoin is ‘useless as a payment mechanism and ridiculous as a store of value,’ ex-PayPal CEO says CNBC
The case for going to bed at 2:30 am Vox
↩︎ The Making of a Story: WIRED
↩︎ Book Marks
Bitcoin is ‘useless as a payment mechanism and ridiculous as a store of value,’ ex-PayPal CEO says CNBC
The case for going to bed at 2:30 am Vox
The science behind rooting for the home team MedicalXpress
Death is so basic and so powerful that we think up conspiracies to impose sense on it.
↩︎ The New Republic
A brief history of open floor plans in houses, and why more rooms are better, no matter what anyone tells you.
↩︎ CityLab
Back pain sufferers may be sitting wrong: Try sticking out your butt to follow the natural curve of your spine.
↩︎ NP
"Sudden savant syndrome" is when an ordinary person produces almost instantaneous giftedness in music, art, or math.
↩︎ Scientific American
Simone Weil was a French pseudo-Catholic mystic and writer of monkish austerity. Her life and death are stark and memorable. ... Simone Weil
JACK DUNPHY: The Real Reasons for Chicago’s Deadly Crime Wave.
Owning at TV is associated with about a 6% reduction in the likelihood of having had sex in the past week.The National Bureau of Economic Research
Back pain sufferers may be sitting wrong: Try sticking out your butt to follow the natural curve of your spine.
↩︎ NP
Poetry Is Cool Again!
Times are changing, and poets? Well, they draw huge crowds. “The face of poetry in the United States looks very different today than it did even a decade ago, and far more like the demographics of Millennial America. If anything, the current crop of emerging poets anticipates the face of young America 30 years from now.”
↩︎ Scientific American
Simone Weil was a French pseudo-Catholic mystic and writer of monkish austerity. Her life and death are stark and memorable. ... Simone Weil
JACK DUNPHY: The Real Reasons for Chicago’s Deadly Crime Wave.
Never did we apologize for a poem we published. We saw it as part of our job to provoke our readers—a mission we took especially seriously in serving the magazine’s absolute devotion to a free press.
↩︎ The New York Times
Owning at TV is associated with about a 6% reduction in the likelihood of having had sex in the past week.The National Bureau of Economic Research
Visual Literacy for the MEdia Dragons
Sherwin, Richard K., Visual Literacy for the Legal Profession (January 15, 2018). Journal of Legal Education, Forthcoming . Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3212819
Digital technology has transformed the way we communicate in society. Swept along on a digital tide, words, sounds, and images easily, and often, flow together. This state of affairs has radically affected not only our commercial and political practices in society, but also the way we practice law. Unfortunately, legal education and legal theory have not kept up. Inconsistencies and unpredictability in the way courts ascertain the admissibility of various kinds of visual evidence and visual argumentation, lapses in the cross examination of visual evidence at trial, and inadequately theorized notions of visual meaning and the epistemology of affect tell us that the status quo in legal education is untenable. Law teachers today have an obligation to provide their students with the rudiments of visual literacy.