Meet the Maestro
Robin Ticciati—the new music director for the UK’s Glyndebourne Opera company—is not your typical conductor. He’s young, “radically collaborative,” and out to shake things up.
Among the Reindeer
A woman running a media consultancy in New York takes a DNA test and learns that she is descended from the Sami people, who herd reindeer in the Arctic Circle.
Es Devlin’s Magic Circles
Inside the creative world of the set designer, who has worked with the Olympics, the opera, and Miley Cyrus:
There’s a philosophy that goes with all this, which Devlin lays out for me in an e-mail from a hotel room in Ipanema. “The environment and/or objects and light are chosen very specifically on a moment-by-moment basis. When it’s working, each constellation of word, prop, action, costume, character, light, plot and environment should chime towards a cumulative effect. For example: that shoe with that phrase with that light on that cup on that table in this room with this sound—and then that moment is over and we are onto the next one: that eye-shadow, with this music, with that fork, with that light on that face within the frame of that window wearing that T-shirt. It’s composed like notes on a stave—layers fusing together to form a whole sound, beat by beat.”
John Green: Teenager, Aged 36
A profile of the author of the wildly popular book The Fault in Our Stars:
His greatest fear was that he would upset the very people he was writing about, sick teens, who would see the novel as a monstrous presumption. By and large, Green says, that hasn’t been the case. “One of the unexpected blessings of this book is that sick kids have responded terrifically generously. They read it looking for emotional truths.” If Esther taught him anything, it is that “one of the most psychically damaging things about chronic illness is that it can be a separation between you and the rest of the world. Because the way the world looks at you is often as if you are semi-human; as if you’re partly dead.”
A Fish for Our Time: The Mystery of the Coelacanth
Inside the quest to understand whether the coelacanth is an early ancestor to tetrapods:
The Coelacanthus fossils caused a stir in the scientific world, particularly after the publication of Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” in 1859. In the coelacanth’s lobed fins, palaeontologists thought they saw clues to the identity of the “missing link”, the first fish that crawled out of the sea to evolve into amphibians, reptiles, mammals and, eventually, man. They postulated that the lobed fins of the fossil coelacanths suggested that they were the ancestor of the first fish that crawled out of the sea. Others put their money on the lungfish, the first living specimen of which had been discovered in the Amazon in the 1830s by Johann Natterer, a Viennese naturalist.
A Velvet Fist
Profile of Srdja Popovic, who was a member of Otpor (Resistance), the nonviolent group that helped topple Serbia’s dictator, Slobodan Milosevic, in 2000. He’s since formed an NGO called Canvas, which advises rebels in 40 countries on how to use the tools of nonviolent struggle:
“The trainers, all former participants in protests, deliver the curriculum, usually in English. The trainees analyse and evaluate their country’s situation, after being coached in the theory of nonviolent struggle and the three principles for its success: unity, planning and nonviolent discipline. They study the role of consent and obedience, and ‘pillars of society’ (military, police, judiciary, bureaucracy), and how to lure ordinary people away from them and towards the nonviolent movement. Next come strategy and tactics, especially ‘low-risk tactics’, such as co-ordinated banging of metal pans at set times across a city—actions in which all can join, and which keep people in the movement even under harsh oppression.”
The Cuban Grapevine
Somehow I’ve ended up helping to cater a party in Havana, and a burly, jovial architect called Rafael is asking me whether I’ve heard of Radio Bemba. Basically it’s the Cuban grapevine: “Bemba” is a slang word for big lips, and the expression has its origins in the way Fidel Castro communicated with his men in the 1950s when they were holed up in the Sierra Maestra building the revolution. Today, in a nation where the only official media are state-controlled, Radio Bemba has become shorthand for the word-of-mouth information network, which is by far the quickest (and often the most reliable) way to find out about anything from baseball chat to celebrity gossip to news of the latest defection to the United States.
Women in China: A Social Revolution
When I arrived in the university town of Nanjing on my first visit to China in 2007, I spent days on end watching and talking to students, marvelling above all at the confidence, competence and poise of the girls. I was working on a book about Pearl Buck, who grew up in the Chinese countryside before teaching on the Nanjing campus in the 1920s, so I knew a lot about the world of these girls’ grandmothers: a slow-moving world where traffic went by river steamer or canal boat, and the only wheeled vehicle most people ever saw was a wheelbarrow. Girls were shut up at home on reaching puberty with no further access to the outside world, and no voice in their own or their family’s affairs.
Won’t Get Fooled Again
Rock music in 2011 is not quite what it was in the mid-1960s. For one thing, it is full of challenging coincidences, such as the one reported by Pete Townshend in a recent e-mail. “I was supposed to be sailing in the St Barth’s Bucket Race on March 24th,” he wrote. That’s right: the writer of “My Generation”, “Substitute” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again” now spends part of his time as a yachtsman in the Caribbean. “This was arranged last August,” he added. “In a challenging coincidence Roger Daltrey will be performing ‘Tommy’ on that very day for Teenage Cancer [Trust] at the Royal Albert Hall.”
Breaking Bad News
For decades, the way bad news was broken was, as one official British report put it, “deeply insensitive.” Now we do it better, thanks to the efforts of one American widow. “Common sense tells us that those facts are an emotional bomb waiting to go off. And medical thinking now recognizes this: receiving bad news, according to the Western Journal of Medicine, ‘results in cognitive, behavioral, or emotional deficit in the person receiving the news that persists for some time after the news is received.'”