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Index: Noted elsewhere

Dancing down Bollywood boulevard.

Basic Bollywood steps rely on the relationship between the leg and hip, what often takes students the longest time to master. Once the hip movements become natural, each progressive step is much easier to learn.

For André Deutsch, Time-Life wasted the former and made misery of the latter.

Time-Life naturally expected progress reports, every so often asking André Deutsch for details about, say, their publishing plans for the next five years. But given the unpredictable, even chaotic nature of independent book publishing – and maybe especially given the nature of the firm being asked, and of its owner – this request was also seen as a bit daft.

Enter Vivian Maier, finally out of the shadows.

‘Vivian Maier, proud native of France and Chicago resident for the last 50 years died peacefully on Monday. Second mother to John, Lane and Matthew. A free and kindred spirit who magically touched the lives of all who knew her.’

The genial grit of John Wayne, the grittier grit of Jeff Bridges.

Bridges is a riskier proposition than Wayne. He feels like a dangerous man, seriously out of control, not playing at decrepitude and disorder.

Education’s most ‘intractable problem’? Lots of pregnant teenage schoolgirls.

This year, all of my favorite girls are pregnant, four in all, future unwed mothers every one. There will be no innovation in this quarter, no race to the top. Personal moral accountability is the electrified rail that no politician wants to touch.

Lithuanian Jews: Difficult questions for University College, simple answers from history.

The history of the Shoah in Lithuania is depressingly simple. While the guilt of the German and Austrian Nazis in launching the Final Solution all over Europe and creating the circumstances in which it was carried out in the Baltics is absolutely unequivocal, it was the extensive and zealous involvement of all strata of Lithuanian society in the mass murders that spawned the near-totality of the destruction.

The Philharmonic attic, ‘from the letters of Presidents to the smallest scrap of paper’.

[The International Era] is the time period with the greatest variety of formats for the Digital Archives to test our assumptions about cross-searching; scores, programs, press clippings, business documents, images, film, audio and video. Although the audio and video items are now only a sample, we are developing a long-term strategy for this material to be available in the not-so-distant future.

Roger Penrose: Why we should take our universes one at a time.

The main thing that I am not happy about is that I don’t see how we have the remotest idea what would happen in a world where the constants of nature were different because we know the life we know. And there could be life of a completely utterly different kind that we have no conception of.

From Tunisia to Egypt: The digital dominoes of Araby.

The prospects of secular outcomes to Middle Eastern chaos? Some revealing and counterintuitive information.

Why did NPR’s Michele Norris stop to tweet instead of running for the plane?

I should mention that I don’t know Michele Norris. I wouldn’t recognize her if she sat on me. Yet here in the unheated waiting room I found myself wondering why she would be in Chicago.

The ‘rose-colored dream of Europe has now faded’ for the Turks, too.

This rose-colored dream of Europe, once so powerful that even our most anti-Western thinkers and politicians secretly believed in it, has now faded.

What’s a ‘book’? Look it up on your Kindle.

Amazon and Apple are now rivals in a new kind of Christmas chart, with the Kindle and the iPad both competing for digital readership dominance.

Charlie Chan: Number one Swede in yellowface.

The Swedish actor Warner Oland, who played Chan, was so popular in China that Chinese and Hong Kong film studios started producing knock-off versions.

The secret treasure in gamification’s future.

“Games aren’t leading us to the downfall of human civilization,” she writes. “They’re leading us to its reinvention.”

Daniel Bell, an eloquent defender of modernity, dies at 91.

Yet such a situation is unsettling, for in any society (other than a small one of peers) the loss of authority leads to a reliance on power, and power rules through the implicit threat and the explicit use of force.