Sightings

Doris O'Brien writes: Trump, an inveterate risk taker, refuses to play it safe. He often repeats phrases, as if to nail them down. And while his supporters profess admiration for his talking 'extemporaneously,' he is technically doing no such thing. By definition, 'extemporaneous' means to speak from notes, as opposed to memorization or reading from a script. Hillary's speaking style suffers from being the reverse. She is too predictably 'on script,' making her delivery sound mechanically driven, rather than 'in the moment' inspiring. When she does veer from her teleprompter, she measures her words carefully, punctuating them with a lot of annoying "uhs". more »

"A popular misconception is that all manuscripts were made by monks and contained religious texts, but from the 11th century onwards professional scribes and artists were increasingly involved in a thriving book trade, producing both religious and secular texts." Spanning the 8th to the 17th centuries, the 150 manuscripts and fragments [in the exhibit] guide us on a journey through time, stopping at leading artistic centers of medieval and Renaissance Europe. more »

The three crime novels reviewed are not your ordinary fast beach reads. They take place in different cultures and all the crimes, which occur in the present, are connected to a specific historical context. None of the three novels makes you feel like you are reading a textbook, but each raises issues about international politics and social justice in a completely engaging way. more »

Ann Voorhees Baker writes: The lesson is that sometimes it's worth breaking the fourth wall, to borrow a term from the theater when an actor breaks the imaginary wall at the front of the stage and speaks directly to the audience as himself, not his character. Sometimes when the whole beautiful program or platform just gets messed up, or you mess it up, it's time to break that fourth wall and exit the system entirely and contact the humans who built it and say 'what the heck.' more »