L’Agence Nationale de la Recherche et le Festival d’Avignon s’associent pour organiser, les 9, 10 et 11 juillet, les « Rencontres Recherche et Création ». Dès sa naissance, le Festival d’Avignon a été un lieu de réflexion et de pensée. La création, la culture, les langues, le fonctionnement de l’esprit humain, sont au cœur de nombreux travaux de recherche soutenus par l’ANR. L’organisation de ces rencontres dans le cadre des Ateliers de la pensée sera l’occasion de réaffirmer le lien entre la recherche scientifique, la création, les publics et la société. Voir l'article...

By Scott McLemee. Umberto Eco, who died last week at the age of 84, once defined the polymath as someone “interested in everything, and nothing else.” (Now that’s more like it!) The formulation is paradoxical, or almost: the twist comes from taking “nothing else” to mean “nothing more.” It would be clearer to say that polymaths are “interested in everything, and nothing less,” but also duller. Read more...

By Tom Bartlett. Hemingway got one. So did Faulkner, his stylistic rival. Nabokov, naturally. Austen, of course. Conrad made the list; Twain, too. Wilde. Both Woolf and Melville merited a pair. Beckett, three. Six for Shakespeare. The writers with entire sessions devoted to their oeuvres at the Modern Language Association’s annual meeting last month require no first names: They are the thoroughly anthologized, the universally acclaimed. More...

By Ron Rosenbaum. Have you noticed that every few years a controversy arises over a claim that an old portrait found in someone’s attic is the true face of William Shakespeare? Most recently the British publication Country Life gave front-cover, stop-the-presses treatment ("The Greatest Discovery in 400 Years") to a pathetically generic engraving that "secret cyphers" supposedly proved was Shakespeare’s face. More...