Arts News

What distracts Taylor Swift on stage

Singer Taylor Swift says while performing on the stage she is distracted by fans with sign boards and she goes off track. The 23-year-old, known for her songs like "Love story", "Teardrops on my guitar" and "You belong with me", starts reading the signs and forgets her lyrics, reports thesun.co.uk. "It's amazing and adorable, but if there's a really long sign and I'm trying to read it while ...
Shaolin temple goes global

The Shaolin Temple, known as the cradle of Chinese kung fu, is preparing to stage its first cultural festival in the US as part of efforts to expand its global clout. The first North American Shaolin Cultural Festival is scheduled to be held from Oct 8 to 14 in Los Angeles, according to Shi Yongxin, abbot of the Buddhist temple in the city of Dengfeng in central China's Henan province, reported ...
Mark Morris The man who put heart back into dance

Mark Morris: 'You don't feel like you're looking at a dance company,' said Canadian dancer Peggy Baker of the Mark Morris Dance Group. 'You feel like you're looking at a gathering of people who dance together.' (Michael Falco FOR THE GLOBE AND ...
God of Carnage at Center Stage Theater

/small-ad --> The director and teacher Peter Frisch has given a great deal of support to the performing arts community here in Santa Barbara, both through his leadership as the initial directory at the new Granada and through his acting studio classes. He's a seasoned professional, with serious credits in stage and television, and I'm sure he'll be back with something ...
Marlings career a bit of a fluke

Brit Marling looks as if she might have been born wearing a string of very good pearls. That the patrician blonde, 29, is a screenwriter and actress is a bit of a fluke, to hear her tell it. The Chicago-born Marling was on another sort of trajectory altogether when she started an economics degree at Georgetown University. There was, for example, that job at Goldman Sachs she turned down. ...

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Movie Review

The Vanishing (Spoorloos) [DVD]

(Warning: The Vanishing has one of the most justly famous endings in recent cinema, and as it is difficult to fully discuss the film's merits without mentioning what it is, I recommend that anyone who has not seen the film and does not want the ending given away stop reading now.) ...

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Cyrus Hemsworth go on date night

Singer/actress Miley Cyrus and her fiance Liam Hemsworth proved their romance is still going strong on Monday after stepping out together for the first time since January. The stars' relationship has come under intense scrutiny amid persistent reports suggesting they are on the verge of a split, but they showed no signs of trouble in Los Angeles, where they were photographed heading out to ...
John Studzinski Marrying business and the arts

The banker John Studzinski is helping to nurture young theatre directors. He's a living example of how commerce and culture can sit comfortably ...
Painting of the artists son wins BP portrait award for Susanne du Toit

Susanne du Toit's portrait of her son Pieter. 'I look to the body to provide as much expression as the face,' she says. Photograph: National Portrait ...
The many musical pinnacles of T Bone Burnett

Producer-musician T Bone Burnett, firmly established as the guru of Americana music, was recruited by folk-rock icon John Mellencamp and suspense author Stephen King to make some sense out of their long-gestating Southern-gothic ...
New book claims child-catchers kidnapped boys for the Elizabethan stage

Child-catchers stalked the streets of Elizabethan England seeking out boys they could force on to the stage, an Oxford academic has claimed in a new ...

More Arts News

Reported in the press

Our nuclear programmes are completely transparent. But we are ready to show greater transparency and make clear for the whole world that the steps of the Islamic Republic of Iran are completely within international frameworks. The sanctions are unfair, the Iranian people are suffering, and our (nuclear) activities are legal. These sanctions are illegal and only benefit Israel.

Hassan Rouhani

Iran's president-elect was speaking after his historic election victory.

Hotel Review

The Helmsley Park Lane, New York

The best feature of this hotel is its location, overlooking Central Park in the heart of Manhattan. The hotel also ...

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Featured Story

Why we crave things we should not

A new study from the University of British Columbia has shed light on how people become obsessed with forbidden pleasures.

The study showed that when people are forbidden from something, it takes on a new level of focus.

"Our findings show that when individuals are forbidden from everyday objects, our minds and brains pay more attention to them," said lead author Grace Truong, a graduate student in UBC's Dept. of Psychology.

"Our brains give forbidden objects the same level of attention as our own personal possessions," Truong added.

The study's most important finding, though, is that obsession is not as strong if others are also denied: when an object is forbidden to a group, the allure of the object drops dramatically.

This helps to explain why group diet techniques such as Weight Watchers can be more successful than dieting alone. It also offers important insights for compulsive hoarding and parents seeking to help their children's attachment to toys and other possessions.

For the study, groups of participants were shown images of everyday objects and told the objects were either theirs, someone else's, forbidden to them or forbidden to everyone. Using electronic brain imaging and memory tests, researchers found the forbidden objects were recognized as well as self-owned objects. ...