Word: prized
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...Escher, the fantastical Dutch artist M.C. Escher; and Bach, the Baroque composer Johann Sebastian Bach. The extraordinary mind that braided these three figures together in one book belonged to one Douglas Hofstadter, a physics Ph.D. who was only 34 years old at the time. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1980 for Gdel, Escher, Bach, and it went on to become a cult classic that influenced a generation of thinkers. Since then Hofstadter has published on numerous subjects, but he never went back at length to the themes of his first book...
Hofstadter's unique intellectual makeup is rooted in his childhood. His father was Robert Hofstadter, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1961. As a boy, Hofstadter was fascinated by visual and conceptual loops: feedback, self-reference, recursiveness, anything that curved back on itself in an unexpected way. He provides several examples in I Am a Strange Loop (which is, among many other things, an intellectual autobiography). In the comic strip Nancy, Sluggo has a dream about a dreaming Sluggo, who is also dreaming of Sluggo, and so on in an infinite chain. The girl on the Morton...
...purest form of the social weepie is usually a European art film. And Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes the Barley--which won the top prize at Cannes last year, has played at film festivals on four continents and is now in U.S. theaters--is an ideal Exhibit...
...needed renovations.In 1998, renowned Italian architect Renzo Piano came to Cambridge to design a new art museum on Memorial Drive. Piano, who is also currently working on expansions of the Isabella Steward Gardner Museum in Boston and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, won the Pritzer Prize, the architecture world’s highest honor, that same year.Piano’s two-building project was slated to create gallery space for modern and contemporary art in one building and serve as a new home for the Sackler Museum’s ancient and non-Western collection...
...Case for Literature,” a collection of essays and lectures inspired by the 2000 Nobel Lecture of Gao Xingjian—the only Chinese author ever to win the Nobel Prize for Literature—is in many ways the author’s literary manifesto.Gao, an intellectual who wrote his most well known novel, “Soul Mountain,” while in exile after the Chinese Cultural Revolution, is a self-described non-Communist, non-democratic, non-traditionalist non-modernist author. Rejecting the ideological dogmatism that defined the nation of his birth, Gao argues...