Saturday, October 26, 2019

Dancing can reverse the signs of aging in the brain

       In this week's Times Literary Supplement they have an interesting piece where: 'Twenty-five writers reflect on the magazines and journals they have enjoyed over the years',Electric conversations. 
       Hard not to be ... uh, impressed by Thomas Meaney's extensive reading, among the responses. 

Nikon has announced the winning entries in the 2019 Small World Photomicrography Competition. Here are a few of the winners that caught my eye

 The sounds of Diwali

The sounds of water ... swimming at Mrs Macquarie Chair pool ...



What Diwali Means To 10 South Asian Australians
 Solomon Volkov on Stalin and Shostakovich
Of Joseph Stalin the culture-czar, Solomon Volkov comments:   “People underestimate the level of control that Stalin maintained. I once tried to count the ...read more








Preparing for 25 years - Scripting News

 
At last, we hear the beautiful — and sometimes bawdy — Persian Malchkoeun like poems by other women
Michael Dirda, via Washington Post
Their words leave nothing veiled, as in a four-line outburst by the 15th-century Mehri, “an answer to an old man who proposed himself as her lover”.

Netflix Reveals What Its Audience Is Watching. Here’s What We Learned


Although we’re still starved of the bottom end of the list and, disappointingly yet tellingly, any box-office data for its theatrical releases, we can start to see what is and isn’t working for the platform. – Irish Times

The Throat-Singing Mongolian Rock Band That Has Taken Worldwide Music Charts By Storm


Their first two videos, for Wolf Totem, andYuve Yuve Yu (or How Strange, How Strange) have amassed more than 45m views on YouTube over the last year, while their debut album, The Gereg, opened at No 1 on Billboard’s Top New Artist chart and No 2 on the magazine’s Indie Label chart. – The Guardian


“Between February and May 1955, a group secretly funded by the Central Intelligence Agency launched a secret weapon into Communist territory. Gathering at launch sites in West Germany, operatives inflated 10-foot balloons, armed them their payload, waited for favorable winds and launched them into Poland.
“They then watched as the balloons were carried deep behind the Iron Curtain, where they would eventually disgorge their contents. These, though, were not explosives or incendiary weapons: they were books,” Duncan White writes in the opening of his book, “Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War.”

“At the height of the Cold War, the CIA made copies of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” rain down from the Communist sky.”
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