Новости за 08.04.2016

“Anyone my age can remember walking into a movie palace where the ceiling was far overhead and the balconies reached away into the shadows. We remember the sound of 2,000 people laughing all at once. Today you walk into a shoebox, and peer around the head of the person in front of you, and in the quiet moments you can hear the sound effects from the movie next door. ‘I lost it at the movies’, Pauline Kael said, and we all knew just what she meant. Now we can’t even give it away”

Biologists propose a new “tree of life” — a schematic diagram collecting all known forms of life on earth into related groups. Older versions of the tree relied largely on the visible appearance of things, and were dominated by eukaryotes — animals and plants, basically. The new tree relies on gene sequencing, and pushes eukaryotes into a corner. Most life on earth is bacteria and other invisible microorganisms

Shakespeare and Cervantes died on the same date in 1616, though not on the same day; Spain used the Gregorian calendar, England the Julian. The one had probably never heard of the other. But independently they made the same discovery. A work of literature does not have to be comic, or tragic, or romantic, or political, or historical. If properly conceived it can be many things at the same time

Liquid lunch in th City of London with the leader of the UK Independence Party. Entertaining throughout. Straight questions, straight answers, plenty to drink: Six pints of beer, a bottle of claret, and half a bottle of port. “The Lamb serves food but Farage has other plans. We walk down Cornhill to Simpson’s Tavern. I survey the clientele, and conclude that there’s unlikely to be a queue for the women’s toilets”

As the only undisputed Stradivarius violin in pristine condition, the Messiah sits behind glass in an Oxford museum. It has never been a performing musician’s instrument, so we don’t know how it sounds, which ought to be the test of its value. Instead it is valued for its authenticity — a situation not without irony, since its two 19C owners were themselves notorious violin forgers. What if the Oxford Messiah were their masterpiece?

Portrait of Brooklyn’s baddest neighbourhood. “Walk the streets and you’ll pass scrapyards; junk­yards; auto dismantlers; methadone clinics; prostitution motels that charge by the hour; seventeen mental health facilities; fifteen drug-treatment facilities; twelve homeless shelters; half-way houses and three-quarter houses. Walk more and you’ll pass a drugstore with a handwritten sign on the front window: We have no Oxycontin”