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Deborah Tatar

Deborah Tatar is a professor of computer science and, by courtesy, psychology, at Virginia Tech.


Ai Weiwei and trust in the system 〈The background- foreground playground〉

Posted: Wed, January 23, 2013 - 2:34:25

Ai Weiwei has his first U.S. show at the Hirshhorn Gallery in D.C. It is a big retrospective, with many rooms, many galleries, many pieces, many different media, and many techniques. Ai Weiwei is a Chinese dissident artist who earlier in his life lived in Germany and in New York for long blocks of time. Some of the commentary is…

The background foreground playground: LOTR and The Hobbit

Posted: Sun, January 06, 2013 - 4:55:16

After the first Lord of the Rings (LOTR) movie came out, Louis Menand wrote a review, probably in NYRB (the New York Review of Books), in which he mentioned that he had taken a particularly thoughtful 14 year old to see it. Afterwards, he asked the young man whether the battle scenes were portrayed as he had imagined them, particularly…