Frieze Los Angeles has revealed that more than seventy galleries will participate in its 2020 edition, which is taking place at Paramount Pictures Studios from February 14 to February 16. It is also introducing a new feature section devoted to emerging LA galleries, Focus LA, which will be curated by Rita Gonzalez, the curator and head of contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 

“Dialogue and reason may seem like the default, but historically, they are in fact a rarity,” said Alex Fogelson, events coordinator for Carnegie Mellon’s Humanist League, setting the stage for last Tuesday’s Sagan Fest talk in McConomy Auditorium.

Professor Jonathan D. Haidt, Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University, was invited to give a talk titled “Finding Truth in a Polarized Age” at the event.

Read it here.

NPR’s Chief Legal Affairs Correspondent Nina Totenberg discussed the beginnings of her journalism career, her longtime coverage of the Supreme Court and offered advice to about 1,000 student journalists and advisers in an on-stage conversation with the Student Press Law Center’s Sommer Ingram Dean on Nov. 2.

All six new chapters will be led by leaders in local literary communities who have showed leadership and activism in this space. “Our chapters will bring years of mobilization, activism and organizing among writing communities across the country to the next level. We are exceptionally proud of the local leaders who are driving forward this effort,” said PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel.

Media theorist and author Douglas Rushkoff has joined the lineup for PRovoke19 next week, where he will explore whether public relations needs to be more human in an era of autonomous technologies, runaway markets and weaponized media.

The session, moderated by Weber Shandwick CEO Gail Heimann, follows the publication Rushkoff's latest book Team Human, which he describes as a manifesto arguing for human dignity and prosperity in a digital age.

Nicole Eisenman’s Procession was, hands down, the standout entry of the 2019 Whitney Biennial. The multi-figure sculpture is, by turns, baffling, bold, hopeful, lumbering, imaginative, irreverent. Almost every reviewer of the exhibition mentioned the unusual caravan of fellow travelers. Remaining on view until the end of October, Eisenman’s outdoor, site-specific work, which weathered the elements during the course of the show surprisingly well, is comprised of 11 disparate figures and heads executed in a variety of materials, ranging from bronze, plaster, and urethane foam to acrylic yarn, gold leaf, and butcher’s wax. 

Jeffrey Grossman gave 100 students in his introductory chemistry class last fall the activity-tracking watches. One major finding: It can really pay for a student to get enough rest.

Grossman said the study found a “dramatic increase in academic performance with just an hour more sleep per night. . . . You’re going from a C to an A,” reinforcing previous research about how crucial sleep is for students.

The West Wing was an accident. At opening night of PaleyFest on Friday, creator Aaron Sorkin said that he never intended to do television, and when his agent set up a meeting with producer John Wells, he didn't plan to pitch anything. 

Then on the evening of their meeting, Sorkin's friend and Beautiful Mind writer Akiva Goldsman suggested there might be a TV show in the premise from Sorkin's film The American President. 

In Saving American Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age (Farrar, Straus, Giroux), Harvard historian Lizbeth Cohen ’73 paints a picture of postwar urban renewal through the lens of one man’s career. While he was at times brash, Ed Logue was nothing like his fellow developer Robert Moses. As his career unfolded, Logue oversaw the revitalization of crumbling neighborhoods in New Haven, New York City, and Boston, and with each project, he grew more and more sensitive to the grassroots concerns of each locale as well as the importance to preserve the old alongside the new.