Brain Wave

Day of the Dead altar at the British Museum

LONDON, ENGLAND - OCTOBER 29: A decorated altar is unveiled for the British Museum's Day of the Dead celebration on October 29, 2009 in London, England. The altar has been created by Mexican artist Adriana Amaya for Mexico's famous 'The Day of the Dead' celebration, which will be celebrated at the British Museum and in Mexico this Sunday. (Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)Content © 2009 Getty Images All rights reserved. Accessed via PicApp.

Hamlet on Broadway, starring Jude Law

CLICK THE THEATER OPTION AND SELECT "JUDE LAW ON THE MEANING OF HAMLET"

Anarcho-syndicalism; or, a short course on politics

Andrew Wyeth: home-schooling success story

The realist painter -- perhaps magical realist painter -- Andrew Wyeth has died.

This afternoon, NPR had an outstanding item on his life, which included the information that Wyeth had been home-schooled.

Wyeth was a sickly child who was home-schooled; he had lots of time to play imaginary games and wander in the countryside. Wyeth biographer Richard Meryman says that childhood sense of wonder never left him.

"I think to understand Wyeth is to understand that in that body is a 10-year-old boy," Meryman says. "And at the same time the body is occupied by an intensely serious artist."

The son of the well known illustrator N.C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth began his artistic training under his father's tutelage. It was after his father's death in 1945 that Wyeth really came into his own as an artist.

I didn't catch those "imaginary games" or Wyeth's tendency to "wander in the countryside" when I heard the report on the radio, but it stuck out to me when I read the report online. Last February, in the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, I asked my wife to take a photo of me standing beside one of my favorite paintings, "Christina's World" by Wyeth. The stark realism of that painting also seems imbued with a sense of fantasy, or an other-worldly gravity.

'Gladiator' film was accurate: today's lesson in archeology and history

(Previously posted with an imbedded CNN video clip that related the story to Ridley Scott's movie 'Gladiator,' but the video URL doesn't appear to be functioning.)

HANOVER, Germany (CNN) -- Archaeologists have found more than 600 relics from a huge battle between a Roman army and Barbarians in the third century, long after historians believed Rome had given up control of northern Germany.

"We have to write our history books new, because what we thought was that the activities of the Romans ended at nine or 10 (years) after Christ," said Lutz Stratmann, science minister for the German state of Lower Saxony. "Now we know that it must be 200 or 250 after that."

For weeks, archeologist Petra Loenne and her team have been searching this area with metal detectors, pulling hundreds of ancient Roman weapons out of the ground. They paint a picture of a highly organized, technologically superior Roman army beset by Germanic tribes in a forest about 80 km (50 miles) south of the modern city of Hanover.

(Read the rest here.)