Colleges and Universities

Subterms

    Latest story

    138 Shares67 Views

    Harvard’s Taylor Swift Scholars Have Thoughts on ‘The Tortured Poets Department’

    by

    The students taking Harvard University’s class on the singer are studying up. Their final papers are due at the end of the month.Fans of Taylor Swift often study up for a new album, revisiting the singer’s older works to prepare to analyze lyrics and song titles for secret messages and meanings.“The Tortured Poets Department” is getting much the same treatment, and perhaps no group of listeners was better prepared than the students at Harvard University currently studying Ms. Swift’s works in an English class devoted entirely to the artist. The undergraduate course, “Taylor Swift and Her World,” is taught by Stephanie Burt, who has her students comparing Ms. Swift’s songs to works by poets and writers including Willa Cather, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth.On Thursday night, about 50 students from the class gathered in a lecture hall on campus to listen to Ms. Swift’s new album. Mary Pankowski, a 22-year-old senior studying history of art and architecture, wore a cream sweatshirt she bought at Ms. Swift’s Eras tour last year. The group made beaded friendship bracelets to celebrate the new album, she said.When the clock struck midnight, the classroom erupted into applause, and the analysis began. First, the group listened through the album once without discussing, just taking it all in.Certain lines, however, immediately caused a stir, said Samantha Wilhoit, a junior studying government — like a reference to the singer Charlie Puth and the scathing lyrics to the song “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived,” Ms. Wilhoit, 21, said.A line from the song “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” in which Ms. Swift sings, “I cry a lot but I am so productive,” also seemed to resonate, Ms. Wilhoit said, laughing.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    More stories

    • 125 Shares81 Views

      in Music

      What to See, Eat and Do in New Haven, Conn.

      by

      Though the academic scene continues to imbue this coastal Connecticut city with a certain gravitas, surrounding neighborhoods are showing off their own cultural capital in the realms of art, food, music and more.The 75-foot-long brontosaurus at the newly reopened Yale Peabody Museum in New Haven, Conn., is the same dinosaur that the natural history museum has had on display since 1931. Yet it looks different. A fresh pose. New front ribs. The head is repositioned at a more inquisitive angle. The museum’s four-year renovation not only refreshed the nearly 100-year-old building, but also included an overhaul of the fossil mounts that research has proved to be inaccurate.Yale Peabody Museum’s four-year renovation focused not only on the physical space of the nearly 100-year-old building, but also the museum’s fossil mounts, including this brontosaurus skeleton, which has been repositioned, with some parts restored.Philip Keith for The New York TimesThe Peabody’s update — 15,000 square feet were added, creating more spacious galleries and dynamic displays — was a long time coming. Like other Yale museums, it is now free, offers more Spanish-language programming, and is inviting more voices into the conversation, with some exhibits being interpreted by students and artists, opening the lens on how visitors might respond to what they’re seeing.“We want to give the signal that there’s not just one way to react to and interpret what you’re seeing,” said the museum’s director, David Skelly.The concept of change that threads through the Peabody’s 19 galleries is symbolic of what’s happening elsewhere in the city. Over the centuries, New Haven has had chapters devoted to maritime trade, railroads, industrial manufacturing and — as home to Yale University and other institutions of higher learning — education and health care.Now, New Haven — which was among The Times’s 52 Places to Go in 2023 — is going through a chapter driven by creativity and ingenuity. Though Yale continues to imbue New Haven with a certain gravitas, the surrounding city is showing off its own cultural capital in the realms of art, food, music and more.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Stephen Adams, Who Made Yale Music School Tuition-Free, Dies at 86

      by

      A billionaire businessman and a late-blooming piano aficionado, he set a record with the anonymous $100 million gift that he and his wife gave the school.Stephen Adams, a billionaire whose anonymous $100 million gift to the Yale School of Music granted a tuition-free education to talented students embarking on careers in a capricious profession, died on March 14 at his home in Roxbury, Conn. He was 86.His death was confirmed by his wife, Denise (Rhea) Adams.Mr. Adams, who graduated from Yale College in 1959, was not a musician himself. But after he turned 55 and was already a prosperous business executive and wine collector, he became an amateur piano player.In 1999, he marked his class’s 40th-anniversary reunion by donating $10 million to the music school — the largest contribution it had ever received. Six years later, he and his wife surpassed that record when they made their $100 million gift, anonymously.They did not publicly reveal their identity as the donors until 2008, when Mr. Adams was asked to confirm their contribution by an interviewer from Wine Spectator magazine. He agreed to do so then, he said, to spur other contributors as his 50th-anniversary class reunion approached.“My wife and I are Christians, and the Bible speaks of giving in secret,” Mr. Adams told The Yale Daily News in 2009.In that same article, Michael Friedmann, a professor of theory and chamber music, said, “Musicians, as opposed to doctors or lawyers, are not in a position to repay educational loans easily, and the profession has a capricious opportunity structure.” He added, “The new financial conditions at the school, however, put musicians in a very different position in relation to their post-Yale careers.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      David Bordwell, Scholar Who Demystified Filmmaking, Dies at 76

      by

      Roger Ebert called him “our best writer on the cinema.” His scholarship focused on how movies work.David Bordwell, a film studies scholar whose immersive, accessible writing transcended the corridors of academia and illuminated the mechanics of moviemaking to a generation of cinephiles and filmmakers, died on Feb. 29 at his home in Madison, Wis. He was 76.The cause was interstitial pulmonary fibrosis, said his wife, Kristin Thompson, a prominent film scholar who frequently collaborated with him.Dr. Bordwell taught at the University of Wisconsin for 30 years and wrote or co-wrote more than 20 books, including “Film Art: An Introduction” (1979), a textbook written with his wife that is widely used in film studies programs. After retiring in 2004, he and Dr. Thompson analyzed movies on his blog at davidbordwell.net and in videos for the Criterion Channel.Hailed as “our best writer on the cinema” by Roger Ebert, Dr. Bordwell’s film analysis avoided ivory tower theories on the social and political undertones of movies in favor of clear, frame-by-frame examinations of scene structure, shot angles and other elements of filmmaking.In a blog post about “The Social Network,” David Fincher’s 2010 film about the founding of Facebook, he analyzed the facial expressions of Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin (played by Andrew Garfield) during a scene when Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) blindsides him.Dr. Bordwell used a single frame that he cropped into several images.In the first image, only Eduardo’s eyes are visible. “Certainly they give us information — about the direction the person is looking, about a certain state of alertness,” Dr. Bordwell wrote. “The lids aren’t lifted to suggest surprise or fear, but I think you’d agree that no specific emotion seems to emerge from the eyes alone.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      Clyde Taylor, Literary Scholar Who Elevated Black Cinema, Dies at 92

      by

      A leading figure in the field of Black studies in the 1970s, he identified work by Black filmmakers as worthy of serious intellectual attention.Clyde Taylor, a scholar who in the 1970s and ’80s played a leading role in identifying, defining and elevating Black cinema as an art form, died on Jan. 24 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 92.His daughter, Rahdi Taylor, a filmmaker, said the cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.As a young professor in the Los Angeles area in the late 1960s — first at California State University, Long Beach, and then at the University of California, Los Angeles — Dr. Taylor was at the epicenter of a push to bring the study of Black culture into academia.Black culture was not merely an appendage to white culture, he argued, but had its own logic, history and dynamics that grew out of the Black Power and Pan-African movements. And filmmaking, he said, was just as important to Black culture as literature and art.Dr. Taylor in 1958 when he was a student at Howard University, where he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English.via Taylor familyHe was especially taken by the work of a circle of young Black filmmakers in the 1970s that he would later call the “L.A. Rebellion.” Among them were the directors Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, Haile Gerima and Billy Woodberry, all of whom went on to have immense impact on Black directors like Spike Lee and Ava DuVernay.As Dr. Taylor documented, these directors created their own, stripped-down approach to narrative and form. They borrowed from French New Wave, Italian neorealism and Brazil’s Cinema Novo to offer an unblinkered look at everyday Black life, often filming in Watts and other Black neighborhoods in and around Los Angeles.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 88 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      How ‘Insomniac’ Became an a Cappella Sensation

      by

      Few people were aware of the 1994 single “Insomniac” by the rock duo Billy Pilgrim, and it quickly sank into obscurity. But a cappella groups can’t stop singing it. We set out to find an explanation.In high school, I joined Rebel Yell, an a cappella group named after the Billy Idol song. I mostly beatboxed or sang background vocals. But one year, my chorus teacher gave me a lead vocal.It was on a song called “Insomniac,” by a folk rock duo called Billy Pilgrim. Our audiences didn’t know the song before we sang it. None of us did, which made it an odd choice for contemporary a cappella, where most of the songs performed are big hits. I didn’t realize until years later that groups all across the country were singing this song, without knowing anything about the original version.But why?Billy Pilgrim performing in the early 1990s. Two students at Emory University, Kristian Bush and Andrew Hyra, formed Billy Pilgrim in the early 1990s, and their self-titled major record label debut came in 1994. “Insomniac” was released as a single, but never charted. The band, named for the lead character in the Kurt Vonnegut Jr. novel “Slaughterhouse-Five,” didn’t collect much acclaim either.The duo stopped playing together in 2000. Bush formed Sugarland with Jennifer Nettles, and his music career took off. Hyra became a carpenter.However, the strangest thing happened with “Insomniac.”It took on a life of its own. For almost three decades, the song has been a staple of a cappella groups all over the country at all levels, whether high school, colleges, professional groups or otherwise.Go on YouTube, and you’ll find countless performances of the song through the years. A sampling: The professional group Straight No Chaser. Ow! at Glenbrook North High School. Section 8 at Ohio University.Amid the roster of popular songs typically selected by a cappella groups, “Insomniac” stands out as an unusual favorite. Alex Kaplan, a 20-year-old junior at Wesleyan University, said he performed the song with his group, the Wesleyan Spirits, “a couple days ago.”“It’s not uncommon for the occasional song to sort of gain a foothold in the a cappella community if it’s got particular qualities that lend themselves well to performance,” Kaplan said. “‘Insomniac’ is a weird one because it’s, with maybe one or two exceptions, just about the most unknown song that I’ve seen multiple a cappella groups do.”It is a melancholy, guitar-driven love song, with lines like, “I can hear your bare feet on the kitchen floor/I don’t have to have these dreams no more.”The recording begins with a wailing Hammond organ and the middle of the song has a musical interlude, which extends into a jam of sorts. Emily Saliers of the Indigo Girls sings background vocals on the Billy Pilgrim version.“I was looking for a girlfriend,” Bush, the song’s writer, said.The path for “Insomniac” becoming ubiquitous in the a cappella world began before the record was even released.Sheet music for “Insomniac.”Billy PilgrimIn the early 1990s, a cappella — singing without instrumental accompaniment, with the sheer power of the human voice — was changing.Groups like Rockapella and The Nylons were ushering in a new mainstream approach, different from the traditional barbershop quartet style of many predominantly white male groups of the time. This newer style of performance meant that every instrument on a given song was accounted for. Drums would be represented by beatboxing, guitar strums and piano chords represented by rhythmic vocal approximations.Deke Sharon, an a cappella-obsessed student at Tufts University, also helped pioneer the shift, particularly on college campuses. As musical director for the Beelzebubs, the Tufts group, he encouraged previously unperformed arrangements of pop songs. After graduating in 1991, Sharon aimed to make a career spreading the gospel of a cappella.“Everybody laughed,” he said. They said, “You can’t make a career out of a cappella,’” but he said he told them: “It’s so wonderful. If people only knew, they would literally fall in love.”Deke Sharon was part of a shift to a new style of a cappella where every instrument was accounted for. He started compiling the best performances from college campuses.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesThere wasn’t much recorded a cappella before that, except for occasional exceptions like Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry Be Happy” or the Huey Lewis and the News cover of “It’s Alright.”Sharon formed a nonprofit called the Contemporary A Cappella Society, with the aim of popularizing this new, more modern form of vocalizing through a cappella festivals, awards shows and networking events for enthusiasts.He also had an idea. Back then, college groups had no way of spreading their music beyond campuses. There was no YouTube or Spotify. The web had yet to arrive, and even email was uncommon.Using a meticulously crafted database of groups that he had compiled in his dorm room, Sharon started taking submissions for “Best Of College A Cappella” compilation albums. Groups that made the cut would be on a compact disc that they could sell at shows. They could buy them from for $5 and sell them at shows for $15. Suddenly, a performance from, say, Rutgers University, could be available at Boston College.It was around this time that John Craig Fennell, a graduate student at the University of Virginia, joined the Virginia Gentlemen, an all-male offshoot of the Virginia Glee Club. Working at a summer camp in New Jersey, a co-worker handed him the newly released Billy Pilgrim debut.“You hear those first few squeezebox notes on the Billy Pilgrim track,” Fennell said. “I love it. it was immediately compelling.”An arrangement made by John Craig Fennell for the Virginia Gentlemen at the University of Virginia assigned vocal parts to all singers.John FennellHe saw an opportunity to take advantage of the shift in a cappella and stretch the abilities of the Virginia Gentlemen. He painstakingly transcribed the arrangement by hand — how most arranging was done back then — with voices emulating the sounds of the guitar and organ: “JUM-BUH-DUH, JUM-BUH-DUH.”The arrangement marked one the first times that all 14 members of the Virginia Gentlemen had their own vocal part on a song, he said.They submitted their recording to Sharon, who liked it enough to put it on one of the first “Best Of College A Cappella” albums in the mid-1990s.From there, the record hit campuses and the arrangement began to spread the old-fashioned way: word of mouth.Other groups copied the arrangement by ear. A member of the Wesleyan Spirits who had performed a version in high school brought it to the Spirits. That arrangement made its way to the Vineyard Sound, a group based on Martha’s Vineyard. Similar arrangements were performed at the University of Rochester and Plymouth State.“This song is what made me fall in love with my group,” Michelle Shankar, who was part of the Dartmouth Dodecaphonics from 2008 to 2012, said. “They open almost every show with this piece. It’s high energy, super upbeat, at least the a cappella version of it is. And it just starts with this wall of sound — that really high belt that’s like, ‘Whoaaa!’, and that just became an iconic line.”Many of the singers interviewed about the song could not help but sing a few bars, unprompted.Straight No Chaser during a performance. Its members have been singing “Insomniac” since it was a college group at Indiana University in the 1990s.Ashley White“It’s a perfect storm that is specific to ‘Insomniac,’” Walter Chase, a founding member of Straight No Chaser, said.Chase arranged a version after hearing it off the compilation album for the group in the mid-1990s, when it was still a college group at Indiana University: “When you’re a college student and one of the main purposes you do a cappella for is to sing for girls, to get attention and to be able to croon, the soloists’ material is this very heady love song.”On an annual retreat in New Orleans around 2000, the Wesleyan Spirits performed the song at a bar during the day. The bartender informed the group that it just so happened that Bush, the song’s writer, happened to be performing that same night. The Spirits returned that evening and Bush invited the group onstage to sing his song.“I remember trying to play it, and it was very square,” Bush said, laughing. “You can’t really play guitar to it.”Kristian Bush of Billy Pilgrim wrote the song “Insomniac” and performed it for the first time in 1994 with Andrew Hyra. The song became a staple for a cappella groups, despite it not being a hit itself.Elliot Liss for The New York TimesStill, Bush and Hyra had little awareness of the niche hit they had created. Hyra first realized it about a decade ago when he was sitting at a hotel in Martha’s Vineyard with his family, including his sister, the actress Meg Ryan.The Vineyard Sound were nearby and began to sing “Insomniac.”“I was like, ‘Holy cow!’” Hyra said.Ryan, who still calls herself Billy Pilgrim’s No. 1 fan, said she couldn’t believe her ears.“I’m not a singer, but I can always sing along with that song,” the actress said. “They always seem to write these songs that kind of give poetry to something very universal.”With the help of movies like “Pitch Perfect” and the former NBC show “The Sing-Off,” a cappella has gone more mainstream. Production values are higher, and transcription is easier using software. But the Virginia Gentlemen’s arrangement of “Insomniac” remains a constant.Billy Pilgrim reunited during the pandemic. The band has never made any money off the covers, but the song’s spread has left them elated. At concerts, “Insomniac” is their most requested song, Bush said. They even perform a new version.“Maybe that song should have been a big hit,” Hyra says.Bush finds the whole phenomenon delightful.“The music business is a whole series of ‘You’re already failing,’” he said, adding, “Every once in a while, something shows up and it ties a little balloon to your belt loop and suddenly you’re a little lighter, you know? And I think that’s what this does for me.” More

    • 88 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

      His ‘Dracula’ Project: Creating a Funny Vampire

      by

      The great-grandnephew of Bram Stoker has written a comic version of “Dracula” that is appearing Off Broadway.Good morning. It’s Wednesday. We’ll meet someone who can laugh at Dracula because he’s like family. We’ll also find out why grade inflation has become an issue at Yale University.Matthew MurphyIn the past, Dacre Stoker has written or co-written serious fiction about his great-granduncle Bram, the man who gave the world that famous bloodthirsty Transylvanian at the end of the 19th century. Tonight, the younger Stoker will venture into comedy in an Off Broadway theater where “Dracula, a Comedy of Terrors” is playing.He told me last week that he had put together some funny material to deliver when joining the cast onstage after the performance. He said he would take along a prop and tell the actors: “Loved the performance. You might need a transfusion.”The prop won’t really be a transfusion: It will be red wine from a winery in Romania in which he has an interest. The winery is in Walachia, “the state below Transylvania,” he said. “We have given vampires to the country — why not get involved in commerce?”Stoker said his mission was to raise the profile of his ancestor “so the creator himself becomes at least half as famous as his creation.”He added: “This is how I started getting into writing the books and leading tours — asking, ‘Who is Bram Stoker?’ Bringing him into an Off Broadway comedy is another way to increase awareness of this guy.”He also enjoys making Dracula funny. “It’s nice to see that people can poke fun at a scary, horrifying novel that’s been around for 127 years,” he said. (Our reviewer Elisabeth Vincentelli called “Dracula, a Comedy of Terrors,” at New World Stages, “a gender-bending play” that “pays no mind to the ‘terrors’ part of its title.”)Dacre Stoker said his illustrious relative had connections to the world of theater: Bram Stoker’s “claim to fame before Dracula was running the famous Lyceum Theater in London for 27 years,” he said. He was the accommodating business assistant in the long shadow of the notoriously mercurial star Sir Henry Irving, the first actor ever knighted.“Irving had extravagant tastes,” he said, and Bram, who had a master’s in math, “had to hold him back while he crunched the numbers” at the theater, the great-grandnephew said.He also talked about the time his great-granduncle spent in New York: Bram Stoker joined the Players, the private club on Gramercy Park South, in 1893, when he and Irving were on one of eight American tours.“I saw the book where he was nominated by Samuel L. Clemens, his good friend and neighbor from Chelsea,” Dacre Stoker said, “so Mark Twain nominated him. He had more names seconding him than any other page I saw in the book.” Others have written about Bram Stoker’s fascination with the American poet Walt Whitman.Dacre Stoker, 65, a former member of the Canadian men’s pentathlon team who coached the team at the 1988 Olympics, said he had been “like this Indiana Jones version of a literary guy, trying to find the story behind the story, to bring this writer to life, to find out who Bram Stoker was.” He used material he found for “Dracul,” a prequel written with J.D. Barker and published in 2018 that envisioned what might have prompted Bram Stoker to create Dracula.That book followed a 2009 novel, “Dracula: The Un-Dead,” which Dacre Stoker wrote with the screenwriter Ian Holt, himself a Dracula historian. It was the first Dracula project authorized by the Stoker estate since the 1931 film that starred Bela Lugosi.WeatherA system sliding across the Mid-Atlantic states will mean a partly sunny day, with temperatures reaching the low 40s. At night, clouds will give way to a clearer sky, and the temperature will drop to around 30.ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKINGIn effect until Friday (Immaculate Conception).The latest Metro newsAhmed Gaber for The New York TimesConflict and CrisesIsrael-Gaza: Long before the temporary cease-fire ended in Gaza, the mood in Paterson, N.J., home to one of the largest communities of Palestinians outside the Middle East, was tense.Migrants and the mayor: New York City’s comptroller has restricted the mayor’s ability to quickly spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the migrant crisis — a major blow to his emergency powers.A Changing CityToward a quieter city: New York City, not exactly known for its peace and quiet, is expanding its use of “noise cameras,” which ticket the drivers of loud cars and motorcycles.The rich are back: At the height of the pandemic, the richest New Yorkers left in droves. A new report based on census and state tax filing data has found a reversal.Small theaters: New York’s nonprofit Signature Theater has three performance spaces, a history of cultivating major playwrights, and a board chaired by the Hollywood star Edward Norton. What Signature doesn’t have this fall are plays.Lots of A’s at YaleChristopher Capozziello for The New York TimesOne consequence of the pandemic has proved lasting at Yale University: Nearly everyone is getting A’s.A new report found that nearly 80 percent of the grades given to Yale undergraduates during the 2022-23 academic year were A’s or A minuses. The mean grade point average — 3.7 out of a possible 4.0 — was also up from before the pandemic.My colleague Amelia Nierenberg writes that the findings have frustrated some students and professors. What does excellence mean at Yale if 80 percent of the students get the equivalent of “excellent” in almost every class? Shelly Kagan, a Yale philosophy professor with a reputation as a tough grader, said that when “virtually everything that gets turned in” receives an A, “we are simply being dishonest to our students.”The post-pandemic spike in grades is not unique to Yale. At Harvard, 79 percent of all grades given to undergraduates in the 2020-21 year were A’s or A minuses. A decade earlier, that figure was 60 percent. In 2020-21, the average G.P.A. at Harvard was 3.8, compared with 3.41 in 2002-3.“Grades are like any currency,” said Stuart Rojstaczer, a retired Duke University professor who tracks grade inflation: They tend to increase over time.This is not just happening at elite schools. G.P.A.s have been increasing at colleges nationwide by about 0.1 per decade since the early 1980s, he said. But private colleges tend to have higher average G.P.A.s than public colleges and universities.At Yale, where an A is the new normal, the proportion of A’s and A minuses has been climbing for years. In the 2010-11 academic year, just over two-thirds of all grades at Yale — 67 percent — were A’s or A minuses. By 2018-19, the last full academic year before the pandemic, 73 percent were in the A range.Then, during the pandemic, the figure jumped. Almost 82 percent of Yale grades were in the A range in 2021-22. The figure slipped slightly, to about 79 percent, in 2022-23. The new statistics come from a report by Ray Fair, an economics professor whose work was first reported by The Yale Daily News. He declined to comment on his findings.Does any of this really matter?Pericles Lewis, the dean of Yale College, acknowledged that students could be overly concerned with G.P.A.s.But he added: “I don’t think many people care, 10 years out, what kind of grades you got at Yale. They mostly care that you, you know, you studied at Yale.”METROPOLITAN diaryTiffany frameDear Diary:I was cleaning out my closets when I came across a small Tiffany box. Much to my surprise, it did not appear to have ever been opened. Inside, covered in plastic, was a lovely sterling silver picture frame nestled in a Tiffany blue felt bag.Unfortunately, on close examination I could see that the silver had become tarnished. I tried to clean it, but to no avail.I called Tiffany and was told to bring it in for repair. So I traveled to Rockefeller Center, brought the box into the store and was directed to the repair department downstairs.I showed the frame to one of the women at the counter there. She called two other women over to take a look.The three of them admired it, but then said that they didn’t sell Tiffany items.“How could Tiffany not sell Tiffany?” I asked.“You’re in Saks Fifth Avenue!” one of the women said.— Eileen RosenbergIllustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.Stefano Montali and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com.Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. More

    • 138 Shares139 Views

      in Music

      A Harvard Professor Prepares to Teach a New Subject: Taylor Swift

      by

      Swift-inspired classes are sweeping colleges across the country.The syllabus is much like what one might expect from an undergraduate English course, with texts by William Wordsworth, Willa Cather and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. But there is one name on the list that might surprise budding scholars.Taylor Swift.In the spring semester, Stephanie Burt, an English professor at Harvard University, will teach a new class, “Taylor Swift and Her World.” Nearly 300 students have enrolled.The class is part of a wave at academic institutions around the country, including New York University and the University of Texas at Austin. Stanford has invoked the Swift song “All Too Well (Ten Minute Version)” with a course planned for next year titled “All Too Well (Ten Week Version),” and Arizona State University offered a psychology class on Ms. Swift’s work.Next year, the University of California, Berkeley plans to offer “Artistry and Entrepreneurship: Taylor’s Version,” and the University of Florida will school undergraduates in Ms. Swift’s storytelling. The Florida course’s description begins with the words “ … Ready for it?” — an allusion to the song from the album “Reputation.”In a conversation with The New York Times, Professor Burt, 52, discussed her love of Ms. Swift’s music and what exactly her students will be studying. This interview has been edited and condensed.Let’s start with the big question. Are you a Swiftie?Ten or 12 years ago, I noticed that of all of the songs that one would hear in, you know, drugstores and airports and bus stations and public places, there was one that was better than all the other songs. I wanted to know who wrote it. It was just a more compelling song lyrically and musically, just a perfect piece of construction. It was “You Belong With Me.”“Fearless” got you!It turned out she had a lot of other great songs. The thing that made me really think about her as an artist whose process and career I wanted to learn more about and thought about a lot was when I saw “Miss Americana,” the documentary.What about it?It really does such a great job of showing both how much support she’s had — she’s someone who’s come from a good deal of privilege and had parents who really wanted to help her realize her dreams, which, you know, honestly, I have, too — but also how she worked to become herself, and how she has become someone who makes her own decisions in a way that brings people along with her and doesn’t alienate people. I realize that she could probably take fewer private jet flights.The Harvard campus.David Degner for The New York TimesMs. Swift during an August concert in Inglewood, Calif.Michael Tran/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesDo you have a favorite era?It bounces between “Red” and “Folklore”-slash-“Evermore.”Let’s talk a little bit about the coursework. What is on the syllabus?Each week pairs some body of her work with some body of work by other people. We are reading two different Willa Cather novels. We’re reading a novel by James Weldon Johnson about a performing artist who’s got a very different relationship to his own career in his hands. We are reading a contemporary novel by Zan Romanoff about One Direction fandom.We’re going to read some Wordsworth, Wordsworth being a Lake District poet. She sings about the poets of the Lake District in England. Wordsworth also writes about some of the same feelings that Taylor sings about: disappointment in retrospect, and looking back and realizing that you’re not the child you were, even though you might want to be.What songs are going to be paired with those texts?We are reading Coleridge’s “Work Without Hope.” “Work Without Hope,” of course, being Coleridge’s version of “You’re on Your Own, Kid.”Of course. How about homework?The written work will include a couple of conventionally argued academic essays, where the student needs to make a well-supported argument with clearly framed evidence in easy-to-follow prose. One of them has to be on a Taylor topic. One of them has to be about something else that we read for the course. So you can’t write about nothing but Taylor Swift and get a good grade.Is there a final?The third of the three papers is the final assignment. I have such mixed feelings about final exams because they stress people out. They’re a pain to give and they’re no fun. On the other hand, Harvard students are also often taking other classes that absolutely demand a lot of time from them, especially if they’re, for example, future doctors. Or they have other commitments that eat up a lot of the time. If you don’t do something to make sure they feel like they have to do the reading, they will sometimes, regretfully, blow off reading.Any chance of a guest lecture by (the honorary) Dr. Swift?I have tweeted at her, and I would welcome her presence if she would like to pop in, but she is quite busy.A Harvard class about Taylor Swift feels ripe for detractors. What would you say to people who might criticize such a subject as unserious or not worthy of rigorous study?This is a course that includes plenty of traditionally admired dead people who’ve been taught in English departments for a long time, who I not only admire but am teaching in this course. Taylor’s work is the spine. If you don’t appreciate this body of songwriting and of performance, that’s not my problem. But they should remember literally everything that takes up a lot of time in a modern English department was at one point a low-prestige popular art form that you wouldn’t bother to study, like Shakespeare’s sonnets and, in particular, the rise of the novel. Can I quote Wordsworth?Please.Others shall love what we have loved and we will teach them how. If you’re going to teach people to love something that they see as obscure or distant or difficult or unfamiliar, your best shot at doing that honestly and effectively is to connect it to something that people already like. More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Theater

      Robert Brustein, Passionate Force in Nonprofit Theater, Dies at 96

      by

      A critic and dramatist himself, he started repertory companies at Yale and Harvard and fiercely defended the art form, even if it meant feuding with playwrights.Robert Brustein, an erudite and contentious advocate for profit-indifferent theater, in the service of which he wore many hats — critic, teacher, producer, director, playwright and even actor — died on Sunday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 96. His death was confirmed by his wife, Doreen Beinart.Mr. Brustein was dean of the drama school at Yale and founded and ran the Yale Repertory Theater and the American Repertory Theater at Harvard, producing well over 100 plays and securing them in the regional theater firmament. He also taught at Yale as well as at Harvard.A prolific writer with the zeal of an environmentalist and the moral certainty of a martyr, he reviewed stage productions for The New Republic for more than 50 years. In many books and in countless newspaper and magazine articles, he argued for brave theater, intellectual theater, nonpandering theater, and worried that the art form was being attenuated by the profit motive.Mr. Brustein was a passionate defender of the resident, nonprofit theaters whose ranks expanded across the United States in the last decades of the 20th century, and as such he was perpetually concerned that they not be corrupted by commercial interests. The Broadway megahit “A Chorus Line,” in one instance — originally produced in 1975 by the Public Theater in New York — had made it clear that a hit show could funnel many years of economic fuel back to the source.“The basic aim of the commercial theater is to make a profit,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in 1990. “The basic aim of noncommercial theater, in its ideal form, is to create the condition whereby works of art can be known. And I don’t think these are compatible aims.”A public intellectual and supporter of the arts, Mr. Brustein delivered opinions that were often respectfully received but that just as often incited exasperation or outrage. Theater people, after all, are not especially fond of being called sellouts. When Frank Rich left his post as chief drama critic for The Times in 1994, his valedictory essay singled out Mr. Brustein:“I rarely had ugly confrontations with anyone in the theater, and my mail from theater people, even at its angriest, was civilized,” Mr. Rich wrote. “In 13 years the few significant exceptions invariably involved Robert Brustein.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More