In Brief: March Edition

Here is your regular Sunday selection of links to good things in Blogville and Beyond.

• Via The Literary Saloon, the town of La Charité-sur-Loire has become the home of many of the booksellers moving out of Paris, leading it to be called "The City of Books." [Deutsche Welle]


• America needs to rise up and throw down her left-handed overlords! Who knew that so many recent presidents are inverts? [Wonkette]


• Gerard Mortier has lost some private supporters of New York City Opera, gained some others, and in general is spoiling for a fight. [Financial Times]


• The ever resourceful Greg Allen has a post about art on the moon: both some, er, art images that were smuggled onto the Apollo 12 mission and the proposal to create Nazca lines-like moonworks on the surface of the moon. [greg.org]


• Robert Dornhelm is directing a film version of Puccini's La Bohème, reuniting Anna Netrebko and Rolando Villazón of La Traviata in Salzburg fame. Our favorite Milan-based opera blogger has some photographs. [Opera Chic]


• A recent study claims to indicate that the French language may be in the process of losing its gender division of nouns: native French speakers disagreed on the majority of common nouns in the study, when asked to identify the gender. This should come as no surprise to anyone who has lived in France: a friend's father, who is an immigrant to France from Poland, loves to recount stories about des gens qui ne savent pas le français. Many of the linguistic jokes in the plays of Molière, for example, concern uneducated rubes who make mistakes in the gender of nouns or subject-verb agreement. What's new? [Languagehat]


• Is the New York Philharmonic's visit to North Korea worth all of the heated press coverage it has received? Here are some more voices to add to the fracas:
  
  Mark Swed (Los Angeles Times) | Donald Kirk (Christian Science Monitor) | Warwick Thompson (Bloomberg News) | Tom Huizenga (NPR) | Norman Lebrecht (Bloomberg News)
  
  Washington's local good-for-nothin' PBS affiliates chose not to broadcast the concert (boo!), so I had to watch it online.