New Arts Research Center To Open at SMU

Hoping to derive a more accurate picture of the health of the nation’s art sector, Southern Methodist University in Dallas and the Cultural Data Project in Philadelphia announced on Tuesday that they have jointly created a new National Center for Arts Research, a clearinghouse for arts research.

“In today’s competitive environment, arts and cultural organizations, from museums to orchestras, need to do more than create great works of art,” said José Bowen, dean of the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist. “Arts organizations must have a more research-driven understanding of their markets and industry trends in order to more deeply engage existing audiences and reach new ones.”

According to the university, the goal of the new center, which begins operations Wednesday, is to become the leading source of expertise on arts attendance, patronage management as well as the industry’s financial stability. Arts organizations will also be able to compare themselves with similar organizations using an interactive “dashboard” created in partnership with IBM.

5 Firehouses Recognized as City Landmarks

Christopher D. Brazee/Landmarks Preservation Commission New landmark: Engine Company 73 and its neighbor Hook and Ladder 42 in Longwood in the Bronx.

The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission voted on the fate of five stout buildings on Tuesday. Some of the structures are faced with brownstone and others limestone, some are made of red brick and others orange, but they have one thing in common: prominent garage doors painted a bright, fiery red.

They are all firehouses. Now, they are also official landmarks.

“F.D.N.Y. firehouses are important symbols of bravery, safety and service in the communities they protect,” Salvatre J. Cassano, the city’s fire commissioner, said in a statement. “With these latest landmark designations, the Landmarks Preservation Commission has not only recognized the beautiful architecture and rich histories of these firehouses, they’ve also paid tribute to every F.D.N.Y. firefighter who has called them home for more than a century.”

Eight members of the 11-member commission were present for Tuesday’s vote. All eight voted in favor of granting the designation.

The five firehouses â€" built in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and all still active â€" were nominated by the commission’s staff after a citywide survey of police precincts and firehouses. The number of firehouses citywide designated landmarks is now 37, although five of them have since been converted to other uses, like a theater or an apartment house.

The buildings approved on Tuesday are in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens.

Christopher D. Brazee/Landmarks Preservation Commission Also a landmark: Engine Company 240/Battalion 48 on Prospect Avenue in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn.

Among them is Engine Company 240/Battalion 48, at 1307-1309 Prospect Avenue in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, a two-story building with a brick and limestone face. According to the commission, the early fires its engine company fought included a stable fire that killed 47 horses in the late 1890s and a blaze in Flatbush two years later that destroyed a fireworks company.

Another firehouse given landmark status on Tuesday was Engine Company 228 at 436 39th Street in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, a Romanesque Revival building made o reddish brownstone and brick. It was constructed by a builder named William J. Moran, who also helped erect the former Domino Sugar factory on Kent Avenue.

Engine Company 46, Hook and Ladder 17, at 451-453 E. 176th in the Bronx neighborhood of Bathgate consists of two very similar-looking buildings, which were completed in 1894 and 1904, and designed by Napoleon LeBrun & Sons, the official architecture firm of the fire department from 1880 to 1895.

Engine Company 73, Hook and Ladder 42, at 655-659 and 661 Prospect Avenue, in Longwood in the Bronx, was also designated on Tuesday, as was Engine Company 268, Hook and Ladder 137 at 259 Beach 116th Street, Rockaway Park, Queens. In addition fighting fires, the Rockaway Park firehouse serves a surf and rescue unit.

Plagiarism Pays: Jonah Lehrer Gets $20,000 for Speech

Nina Subin Jonah Lehrer.

Jonah Lehrer, the journalist whose self-borrowings and fabricated quotes led last summer to his firing from The New Yorker and the withdrawal of his best-selling book “Imagine,” appeared at a community journalism conference in Miami on Tuesday to offer his first extensive public statement about his misdeeds.

The talk, according to a spokesman for the Knight Foundation, which sponsored the conference, was aimed at sparking a “hought-provoking discussion” making its audience “more savvy about developing the promise and minimizing the perils of journalism projects.”

The event wasn’t quite Lance Armstrong on “Oprah,” but the news of Mr. Lehrer’s speech, which was streamed live online, certainly provoked plenty of advance incredulity. David Dobbs, a writer for Wired (which also severed ties with Mr. Lehrer in August), posted “Three Questions for Jonah Lehrer,” including: “Will you confess to anything that others haven’t already exposed or stand on the verge of exposing” Others wondered why the Knight Foundation made no mention of Mr. Lehrer’s recent troubles, or even noted the existence of “Imagine.”

Mr. Lehrer, who was paid a $20,000 honorarium, dived righ! t in with a full-throated mea culpa. “I am the author of a book on creativity that contains several fabricated Bob Dylan quotes,” he told the crowd, which apparently could not be counted on to have followed the intense schadenfreude-laced commentary that accompanied his downfall. “I committed plagiarism on my blog, taking without credit or citation an entire paragraph from the blog of Christian Jarrett. I plagiarized from myself. I lied to a journalist named Michael Moynihan to cover up the Dylan fabrications.”

“My mistakes have caused deep pain to those I care about,” he continued. “I’m constantly remembering all the people I’ve hurt and let down.”

If the introduction had the ring of an Alcoholics Anonymous declaration, before too long Mr. Lehrer was surrendering to the higher power of scientific research, cutting back and forth between his own story and th kind of scientific terms â€" “confirmation bias,” “anchoring” â€" he helped popularize. Within minutes he had pivoted from his own “arrogance” and other character flaws to the article on flawed forensic science within the F.B.I. he was working on when his career began unraveling, at one point likening his own corner-cutting to the overconfidence of F.B.I. scientists who fingered the wrong suspect in the 2004 Madrid bombings.

“If we try to hide our mistakes, as I did, any error can become a catastrophe,” he said, adding: “The only way to prevent big failures is a willingness to consider every little one.”

To fend off future errors, Mr. Lehrer vowed to implement what he termed “standard operating procedures” that many journalists, he acknowledged, already follow. “If I’m lucky enough to write again,” he said, “everything I write will be fact-checked and fully footnoted,” he said. All his interviews, he added, will be taped and transcribed, with transcripts! availabl! e to any interview subject who asks.

Throughout, Mr. Lehrer tended to describe his troubles in terms of “errors” and “mistakes” instead of deceptions and lies, as some of the Twitter posts scrolling down the giant video screen behind him pointed out. “Lehrer was humbled to realize how arrogant he was,” tweeted Slate’s Daniel Engber. “Even now, he’s humbled by his arrogance, and arrogant about his humility.” Others, including Mr. Moynihan, the journalist who discovered the fabricated Dylan quotations, noted on Twitter that Mr. Lehrer had still not addressed charges that another of his books, “How We Decide,” also contains problematic passages.

But Mr. Lehrer insisted he was not eager to let himself off the hook. Hanging in his office, he said, is a big poster of Mr. Dylan by the graphic designer Milton Glaser, who has also challenged som quotations attributed to him in “Imagine.”

“It makes me flinch every time I look at it,” he said. “And that’s the point. “

After Delay, Yiddish Writer\'s Papers Will Be Made Available to Public

The papers and personal library of the esteemed Yiddish writer Chaim Grade have finally found a homeâ€"or more precisely two.

The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in Manhattan and the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem have been chosen to jointly receive Grade’s literary estateâ€"including 40 boxes of his letters, manuscripts, and photographs and 20,000 books in his wide-ranging personal library. Although the materials will reside in YIVO’s home on West 16th Street, the two organizations will jointly arrange for the translation and publication of works by Grade (pronounced GRAH-duh), including much that had not previously been published, and digitize the collection for scholars around the world to study. They will also seek to raise $150,000 for a fellowship so a scholar of Yiddish can write a book about the postwar Yiddish world that Grade inhabited.

The fate of thecollection had been in limbo since the death of his widow, Inna Hecker Grade, who died in the north Bronx in 2010 without leaving behind immediate survivors or a legally valid will. The estate was taken over by the office of the Bronx Public Administrator, Bonnie Gould, who asked a half dozen organizations, including Harvard and the University of Texas, as well as YIVO, to review the collection and make bids for its preservation and disposition.

The collection’s fate was complicated by a carbon copy of a will that Mrs. Grade apparently wrote but never formally filed with the courts. In it she requested the Yiddish scholar, Yechiel Szeintuch, an emeritus professor at Hebrew University, to take possession of his papers. Jonathan Brent, the executive director of YIVO, acknowledged that the joint agreement was a Solomonic way of avoiding any quarrels arising from Inna Grade’s will. The National Li! brary, which owns the world’s largest collections of Hebraica and Judaica, is located on the campus of Hebrew University and when its new building is completed in 2017 it will be able to display documents from the Grade collection.

Neither Mr. Brent nor Jay H. Ziffer, counsel to the Bronx public administrator, would reveal the size of the joint bid, but the proceeds will eventually be paid to a handful of first cousins of Mrs. Grade, the closest relatives, who still must prove their kinship in Surrogate’s Court.

Grade, who died in 1982, grew up in Vilna, now Vilnius, a vibrant intellectual hub of Polish and Lithuanian Jews, and studied in yeshivas but forsook Orthodox Judaism and wrote poetry as part of a fabled circle called Yung Vilne. He survived the war by fleeing to Russia but lost his first wife and mother. After meeting Inna Grade, he immigrated to the United Staes and wrote several novels, scores of poems, and a memoir, “My Mother’s Sabbath Days.” Among his most admired fictional works are “The Yeshiva” and “Rabbis and Wives.”

“Chaim Grade produced a body of work of Faulknerian power in its depiction of place and the psychological and moral depths of his characters,” Mr. Brent said in a statement.

While his works were highly praised, he never came close to achieving the fame or book sales of his putative rival Isaac Bashevis Singer. For that many blame his widow, who for two decades after his death parried efforts to translate or study his works.

Mr. Brent said so far no one has unearthed a novel that was never published in Yiddish. But many poems and shorter works have never seen the light of day and some longer fictional works were never translated into English. The two organizations will share the copyright.

The Long, Long Run: Glenn Frey and Don Henley Reflect on \'History of the Eagles\'

Sam Jones/Showtime Glenn Frey and Don Henley of the Eagles.

They were the band that simultaneously told listeners to take it easy and take it to the limit, and for the Eagles, the contradictions didn’t end there. Over a career filled with laidback hits like “Peaceful Easy Feeling,” “Lyin’ Eyes” and the enigmatic “Hotel California,” this best-selling rock group, led by Glenn Frey and Don Henley, was internally a aldron of professional determination and personal conflict. They spent the 1970s fighting, drinking and drugging while frequently revising their lineup and their sound, and seemed to split for good in 1980. Then, just to throw everyone for a loop, the band reunited in 1994 and has continued to tour and record ever since.

This story is told in unflinching detail in a new documentary, “History of the Eagles,” directed by Alison Ellwood and produced by Alex Gibney (the Oscar-winning director of “Taxi to the Dark Side”), and which will be broadcast in two parts on Showtime, on Friday and Saturday. Mr. Frey and Mr. Henley, who gave the filmmakers free rein to interview friends, rivals and bandmates past and present, spoke recently to ArtsBeat. In these excerpts from that conversation, they talk about their lives in a lane faster than anyone could have suspected.

Q.

What inspired you to finally! tell this story

A.

GLENN FREY We all knew that we wanted to do a history of the band. Starting around 2000, we kept checking - “Is now the right time” “Nah, maybe not yet.” [laughs] About two and a half years ago, we started to get serious. We had finished our touring cycle with “Long Road Out of Eden.” Everybody’s still alive and talking.
DON HENLEY Since we survived, we decided that, after 40 years or so, it was worth keeping some kind of record. I’m going to have some explaining to do to my children.

Q.

Are they old enough to understand what you do for a living

A.

HENLEY They’ve just reached those ages. My son and I had a talk about marijuana the other night, the first one we’ve ever had. He said, “Dad, I don’t understand some of your songs. ‘Hotel California,’ for example - what is ‘colitas’ And I said, “Well, it’s a panish word.” [laughs] Trying to avoid a direct answer. “It’s a botanical term. It means ‘little flowers.’” So he knew, because he’s looked on the Internet. The damn Internet, you can’t hide anything.

Q.

Did Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood approach you about this, or did you seek them out

A.

FREY Our management sent me what they thought were some of the best music documentaries that had been done. And I wasn’t crazy about any of it. So I said, “Why don’t you just send me the reels on the guys that won the Academy Award for best documentary, the last five years” The work of Alex Gibney was very impressive. I went to New York and we had a meeting, and the only thing we had to agree on was that we were going to tell the truth. We were going to let him and Alison Ellwood make the movie. We said, “Absolutely, talk to everybody. Let’s unearth as much stuff as we can and! tell the! story.”
HENLEY We encouraged them to speak to everybody, including ex-members of the band, who don’t necessarily have warm and fuzzy feelings toward us.

Q.

When you two met in Los Angeles in the 1960s, you came from very different parts of the country. But Glenn’s father was a machinist in Detroit, and Don’s father had a car-repair shop in East Texas. Did that help you bond

A.

HENLEY We were trapped on a small independent label called Amos Records. Glenn and his then-partner, J. D. Souther, were a duo on that label, and my group, that Kenny Rogers produced, and we both wanted out. The fact that both of our fathers made a living based on the internal-combustion engine was just sort of a coincidence.
FREY I think the first thing we had in common was ambition. We were looking to write songs with meanings and messages. That was the way we started.

Q.

<> You’ve certainly written a few songs whose meanings no one can agree on.

A.

FREY Those are the best meanings. The unintended ones. The misinterpretations. [laughs]
HENLEY It’s what keeps the whole thing going. People still ask me what “Hotel California” means and I just say to them, “Whatever it means to you is fine with me.”

Q.

One theme that recurs in the documentary is the constantly shifting lineup of the Eagles. Did that make the group stronger

A.

FREY The ride wasn’t for everybody. Some people stayed on the bus longer. It started with the disenchantment of Bernie Leadon, and that was something we had to deal with.
HENLEY We had been given the impression by our early management that if we didn’t keep the four original members, we wouldn’t have a chance. So ! we labore! d under that fear for a long time. Then we realized after Bernie left, and then Randy [Meisner] left, that some people were replaceable, and life would go on and the band would go on. Because the band was built around songs - not around personalities, not around a front man, but the music.

Q.

Glenn, the film gives you a chance to revisit a notorious onstage falling-out you had with Don Felder in 1980, that precipitated the original breakup of the band. Were you chastened by this experience

A.

FREY Let’s put it this way: I’m glad I’ve had a second chance. I could have handled some things a lot better. We put the band back together in 1994 and I played music with Don Felder for six years. So I feel like that’s water under the bridge. We were young and I had a temper. I still have a temper. [laugh] I’ve just retired it.

Q.

You’re also very candid, when it came to the reunion, about explaining why you felt you and Don Henley deserved more money.

A.

FREY That’s the way I felt. I watched Don Henley work really, really hard for 14 years. I felt like he and I were the guys that continued to work in our business, and it was a way that we perpetuated the Eagles as well. I just felt that fair was fair.

Henry Diltz/Showtime The first of many incarnations of the Eagles: Bernie Leadon, Randy Meisner, Don Henley and Glenn Frey.

Q.

When you look back on four decades of! your pas! t fashion and hairstyle choices, were there any you were especially proud of

A.

FREY Proud is not the word I would use. Appalled, maybe. Troubled. Regretful. I’m just thankful it was just hair and clothes. I’m not stuck with any tattoos or piercings I hate.
HENLEY I wish I had that hair now. I wish had that much hair.

Q.

Was it important to you that the documentary include Joe Walsh, who appears as a wild, John Belushi-like figure in the first part, but whose story takes a darker turn in the second part

A.

FREY The Eagles were partly responsible for Joe turning his life around. That’s a wonderful thing. We’re happy for Joe.
HENLEY It wasn’t like he was the only one who was abusing drugs and alcohol. We were all doing it. But Joe’s story has a more dramatic thread running through it. Becuse it was conditional to him joining us for the reunion and it gave him a reason, I think, to clean up his act.

Q.

You want audiences to see there are consequences to a lifestyle filled with drugs and alcohol

A.

FREY It permeated everything - the movies, television, you name it. I’m not using this as a justification, but everybody was doing it. Doctors, lawyers, managers, accountants. It was just a big part of the culture.
HENLEY We all want to spare our offspring - we want them to learn from our mistakes, and of course that doesn’t always happen.

Q.

Don, when you finally had that conversation with your son, how did he take it

A.

HENLEY He was pretty cool. I was never a big pot smoker. But I told him everybody was doing it back then. And he said, “Well, of course you did it, Dad. You were in a rock’n’roll ban! d in the ! 70s.”

Q.

Has working together on this film got you thinking about collaborating on a new album

A.

HENLEY It’s not like we don’t see each other.
FREY The Eagles are a working band. Some years we play a lot of shows, some years we play a dozen shows. We do one year at a time, we think that’s a good way to do it. The band’s going to start thinking about coming back together, and talk about whether everybody wants to uproot themselves from their lives and try to make a record, with all that involves. It’s a shared thing, the leadership. Don and I take turns driving the bus, depending on who’s around.
HENLEY Over the past two years we’ve toured China, including Beijing. We’ve been to South Africa, we’ve been to Dubai. We’re still playing places that we’ve never been before, which is really the most fun of all.

Q.

After telling a storylike this, is there anything left over for your memoirs

A.

[almost in unison] FREY Oh, plenty.
HENLEY Oh, sure. [laughter] You can’t get 42 years into three hours.
FREY There’s certainly more. That’s to figure out later.

Illustrating the Importance of Words, Letter by Letter

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times Arismendy Feliz, a founder of a Bronx artists’ group called the X Collective, at the collective’s current show “New Word Order,” which contains 26 works, each linked to a different letter of the alphabet.

Arismendy Feliz used to hold monthly reading workshops at a struggling middle school in the South Bronx. It was not the students, but the parents â€" many of them Latin-American or West African immigrants â€" who needed help with the ABC’s.

Those lessons inspired Mr. Feliz, a scial worker-turned-community advocate, to mount an art show in the South Bronx this month that highlights the importance of words in a borough where many lack basic literacy skills. Called “New Word Order,” the show consists of 26 pieces â€" photographs, paintings, collages â€" each symbolizing a letter of the alphabet.

The show is the latest effort by Mr. Feliz, 29, and four longtime friends to document the Bronx they grew up in and still live in, scars and all, using their passion for art to put a human face on the borough’s problems, including low achievement, drug addiction, homophobia, domestic violence and obesity. “You have people here who want a better life,” Mr. Feliz said. “But at the same time, we’re plagued with our own internal problems.”

The five have named themselves the X Collective â€" X being shorthand for the Bronx as well as the traditional mark left ! by the illiterate. They set up a gallery in 2011 in the basement of a co-op building in the Mount Eden neighborhood where Mr. Feliz is on the board (he persuaded the building to donate the space). Their shows, advertised on Facebook and through word of mouth, have attracted a loyal following that includes young Bronx professionals, Williamsburg art-scene types, and curious neighbors.

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times Charly Dominguez, another collective member, explained his piece illustrating the letter Y.

The reception has sometimes been mixed. One recent show sought to convey a message oftolerance in a borough with a strong Christian tradition but an increasingly diverse mix of religions. Instead, it drew complaints because actual Bible pages were used to cover the walls.

In the current show, the bleakest works belonged to Charly Dominguez, 32, a mixed-media artist who said he left home at 14 because his traditional Dominican family could not accept that he was gay. He dropped out of school to work odd jobs, struggling with poverty and discrimination. “My sexual orientation has been one of my biggest crosses to bear in the Bronx,” he said.

One collage showed Mr. Dominguez’s head, with angry red lines exploding from it. The work symbolized the letter Y, or as Mr. Dominguez put it, “Why must I be here” Nearby, an acrylic painting interpreted the letter S with a suicide theme: a solitary figure with slit wrists dripping blood under a tree of life.

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times The letter S in the show is represented by a grim piece about suicide.

On another wall, Marcos Cruz hung a self-portrait for the letter I, in which he faced away from the camera. Mr. Cruz, 24, said that he was self-conscious about his appearance after years of being overweight like many teenagers in the Bronx. Every day after school, he said, he used to hang out at his father’s bodega, snacking on chips and soda.

The letter A belonged to Brittany Maldonado, 25, who took a photo portrait of her 84-year-old great-grandmother, who moved to the Bronx from Puerto Rico, to represent ancestry, and aging. Ms. Maldonado, who attended the Dalton School on the Upper East Side on full scholarship and then Sarah Lawrence College, said she often felt like an outsider when she tod people she was from the Bronx.

“Everyone’s like, ‘You live in Guam,’” she recalled. “I’m like, ‘No, it’s a train ride. It’s right there.’”

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times Brittany Maldonado’s piece for the letter A, built around a portrait of her great-grandmother, deals with aging and ancestry.

Mr. Feliz said that he saw the collective’s art as a form of community activism to reach people who might be too intimidated to attend a reading workshop or a meeting, or dial a number on a flier.

“There are a million artists doing exhibits about nothing,” Ms. Maldonado said. “We aim to have! exhibits! that have meaning, stir up conversation, and force people to ask questions that make them uncomfortable â€" as opposed to ‘We’re so talented, look at us.’”

“New Word Order” is in the basement gallery at 221 East 173rd Street through the end of February and can be viewed by appointment only, via contact@thexcollective.org.

In Rare Case of Teamwork, Oxford and Cambridge Join to Try to Buy Ancient Jewish Archive

LONDON â€" In an unlikely partnership the rival universities Oxford and Cambridge will work together to purchase an ancient archive spanning 1,000 years of Jewish history.

The universities, which once fought to obtain related documents, started the joint fund-raising campaign, the first of its kind, on Friday. They will need $1.9 million to purchase the Lewis-Gibson Genizah Collection, which may be sold piecemeal if the current owner, Westminster College in Cambridge, does not find a buyer. A donation of $790,000 has already been made toward the goal, according to a news release.

The collection â€" part of a fragmented, history-shaping hodgepodge of documents and manuscripts originally discovered in a Cairo synagogue â€" contains more than 1,700 Hebrew and Arabic manuscripts dating from the 9th to the 19th century. It includes an eyewitness account of Crusaders and the earliest-known example of a Jewish engagement deed, according to the rlease.

The documents were found in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo. There, a cache called a genizah, intended for the storage of religious texts, amassed centuries of ephemera â€" an “accidental assembly of everything that could be written down,” said Ben Outhwaite, the head of genizah research at Cambridge, in an interview. The documents were stored haphazardly in a hidden two-story chamber now widely known as the Cairo Genizah.

“There was a hole in the wall and they just dropped manuscripts in, like a postbox,” Mr. Outhwaite said. The discovery revolutionized both Jewish and Middle Eastern histories, he said, and is the world’s most richly varied medieval collection. Both universities currently own collections from the Cairo Genizah, according to the release, though the Cambridge collection is by far the world’s largest.

\'Comedy of Errors\' and Musical \'Love\'s Labour\'s Lost\' on Shakespeare in the Park\'s Bill

Long before television sitcoms and the modern families they depict there was Shakespeare’s “Comedy of Errors” and its farcical depiction of some convoluted blood lines. This play â€" about two pairs of twin brothers, separated at birth and reunited in adulthood â€" is one of two works the Public Theater will present this summer as part of its annual Shakespeare in the Park series in a production featuring the comedy stars Jesse Tyler Ferguson (“Modern Family”) and Hamish Linklater (“The New Adventures of Old Christine”). But which twin is each actor playing The Public isn’t saying just yet.

The Public said on Tuesday that Mr. Ferguson (an alumnus of “The Merchant of Venice” and “The Winter’s Tale,” among others”) would play Dromio, and Mr. Linklater (also of “Mercant” and “Winter’s Tale,” as well as Broadway’s “Seminar” and his Off-Broadway play “The Vandal”) would portray Antipholus, in a production directed by Daniel Sullivan. Asked whether this was referring to Dromio and Antipholus of Ephesus, or Dromio and Antipholus of Syracuse - or both sets of characters â€" a press representative for the Public said in an e-mail, “Jesse and Hamish are playing one set of twins but Dan Sullivan has some surprises in store for the rest of the casting.”

The second production of the Shakespeare in the Park season will be a new musical version of “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” with songs by Michael Friedman and an adapted book by Alex Timbers. Mr. Timbers, who is also directing this show, previously collaborated with Mr. Friedman on “Bloody Bloo! dy Andrew Jackson,” the satirical rock musical about the seventh president, which ran at the Public Theater and on Broadway.

“The Comedy of Errors” will be presented at the Delacorte Theater from May 28 through June 30, and “Love’s Labour’s Lost” will run from July 23 through Aug. 18.

\'Comedy of Errors\' and Musical \'Love\'s Labour\'s Lost\' on Shakespeare in the Park\'s Bill

Long before television sitcoms and the modern families they depict there was Shakespeare’s “Comedy of Errors” and its farcical depiction of some convoluted blood lines. This play â€" about two pairs of twin brothers, separated at birth and reunited in adulthood â€" is one of two works the Public Theater will present this summer as part of its annual Shakespeare in the Park series in a production featuring the comedy stars Jesse Tyler Ferguson (“Modern Family”) and Hamish Linklater (“The New Adventures of Old Christine”). But which twin is each actor playing The Public isn’t saying just yet.

The Public said on Tuesday that Mr. Ferguson (an alumnus of “The Merchant of Venice” and “The Winter’s Tale,” among others”) would play Dromio, and Mr. Linklater (also of “Mercant” and “Winter’s Tale,” as well as Broadway’s “Seminar” and his Off-Broadway play “The Vandal”) would portray Antipholus, in a production directed by Daniel Sullivan. Asked whether this was referring to Dromio and Antipholus of Ephesus, or Dromio and Antipholus of Syracuse - or both sets of characters â€" a press representative for the Public said in an e-mail, “Jesse and Hamish are playing one set of twins but Dan Sullivan has some surprises in store for the rest of the casting.”

The second production of the Shakespeare in the Park season will be a new musical version of “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” with songs by Michael Friedman and an adapted book by Alex Timbers. Mr. Timbers, who is also directing this show, previously collaborated with Mr. Friedman on “Bloody Bloo! dy Andrew Jackson,” the satirical rock musical about the seventh president, which ran at the Public Theater and on Broadway.

“The Comedy of Errors” will be presented at the Delacorte Theater from May 28 through June 30, and “Love’s Labour’s Lost” will run from July 23 through Aug. 18.

How Are You Celebrating Abe Lincoln\'s Birthday

Justin L. Fowler/The State Journal-Register, via Associated Press Perhaps with a lightning trip to Lincoln’s Tomb at Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, Ill.

Please share your plans for the bearded one’s 204th anniversary in the comment box. Thanks!

Thoughts From Koch on a \'Fool and a Simpleton\'

Jim Wilson/The New York Times Former Mayor Edward I. Koch conducting a news conference in 1989.

Just when you thought you had heard the last from Edward I. Koch, there’s more.

Additional interviews released by the LaGuardia Community College archives, some conducted as recently as a few months ago, reveal candid recollections by Mr. Koch and his colleagues in city government, both about one another and about their fellow public officials.

Some of the oral histories were not to be released until after the former mayor’s death. Mr. Koch died on Feb. 1.

In one of his more caustic comments, Mr. Koch offers a devastating appraisal of Stanley Simon, who was the Bronx borough president from 1979 to 1987. Mr. Simon resigned, was convicted in a federal racketeering case and was released from prison in 1991, after serving a little over two years.

As borough president, he cast two votes on the Board of Estimate, the powerful citywide body that was later abolished because it violated the principle of one-person, one-vote.

“Stanley Simon was a fool and a simpleton,” Mr. Koch is quoted as recalling, “and you could always count on his vote. I mean, all you had to do was to promise him to upgrade his personal private bathroom at Borough Hall, and he’d vote for anything.”

Mr. Koch recalled that the five borough presidents were much more susceptible to being corralled than members of the City Council.!

“So if you could get the Board of Estimate, which was easier than the City Council, then the mayor could impose his will and therefore you wanted to line up these people,” Mr. Koch said. “Easy to line up Stanley Simon; a bathroom doesn’t cost much.”

In a recent interview, Mr. Simon suggested that Mr. Koch was only joking.

“I told him I didn’t like the competence of his supervision of the agencies, from the lowest to the top,” Mr. Simon recalled. “I was specific with him. I used the bathroom as an example.’’

“I believed in him,” he added. “That’s why I gave him the votes.”

Asked by an interviewer for the LaGuardia oral history project whether he was just kidding, Mr. Koch replied: “It’s true, it’s not a joke. I think we upgraded his bathroom at least two times, maybe three times.”

Mr. Koch had an opportunity to amend his remarks, but was apparently comfortable with his recollection. A transcript states, without elaboration, that he evised it twice.

A spokesman for the Bronx borough president confirmed that the bathroom was renovated at least twice during Mr. Simon’s tenure.

Fans Have New Reason to Worship Johnny Marr

Johnny Marr, the guitarist and songwriter for the seminal 1980s band the Smiths, has been named the winner of this year’s NME Godlike Genius Award, which will be given out just days after Mr. Marr releases a solo album, “The Messenger,” Reuters reported.

Mr. Marr, 49, founded the Smiths with Morrissey in 1983 and they wrote the band’s songs together before splitting up in 1987. Since then he has collaborated with several other groups, among them the Pretenders, Modest House and the Cribs. He has led his own band, Johnny Marr and the Healers, for more than a decade.

The award will be given out at a ceremony in London on Feb. 27. NME awards are handed out in 22 categories with music fans casting votes. “The NME seems to be good at giving this award to people I like so I’m in good company,” Mr. Marr said in a statement. “I gess it means that some things are alright with the world.”

NME’s editor, Mike Williams, said Mr. Marr had played a role in rewriting the history of music with the Smiths. Previous winners of the NME Godlike Genius Award include the Clash and Dave Grohl. Last year’s winner was Noel Gallagher.

In Performance: Mercedes Herrero and Andy Paris of \'The Laramie Project\'

The Tectonic Theater Project’s 2000 docu-play, “The Laramie Project,” is based on interviews with 200 people after the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay 21-year-old student in Laramie, Wyo. In 2010 the company went back to Laramie to interview several of those people again, and then created “The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later.” The two works will be performed in repertory, featuring members of the original cast, at the Harvey Theater of the Brooklyn Academy of Music from Feb. 12-24. In these scenes from “The Laramie Project,” Mercedes Herrero plays Reggie Fluty, the officer who discovered Matthew Shepard’s body, and Andy Paris plays Dr. Cantway, the doctor who tended to him.

Recent videos include Will Chase putting a country twist on a number from “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” and Gia Crovatin in a scene from Neil Labute’s short play “In the Beginning.”

Coming soon: Maggie Siff and Jonathan Cake in a duologue from “Much Ado About Nothing” and Tina Packer in a scene from her Shakespeare-themed show “Women of Will.”

Lincoln Prize Winner Announced

James Oakes’s “Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865,” has been awarded the 2013 Lincoln Prize, bestowed annually by Gettysburg College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History for work about the Civil War.

Mr. Oakes, a professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, will receive $50,000 and a bronze replica of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s bust “Lincoln the Man” at a ceremony in New York on April 10. It is the second Lincoln Prize for Mr. Oakes, who also won in 2008 for “The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics.”

Previous winners of the prize, which was established in 1991, have included Eric Foner, James M. McPherson, Doris Kearns Goodwin and Ken Burns. The runners-up for this year’s award were Stephen Kantrowitz’s “More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a Whie Republic, 1829-1889” and Yael A. Sternhell, “Routes of War: The World of Movement in the Confederate South.”

“Freedom National,” published by W.W. Norton â€" and excerpted here â€" appears at a moment when Steven Spielberg’s film “Lincoln” has prompted intense public debate among historians about whether Lincoln can really be said to have “freed” slaves who were already taking action to liberate themselves. Mr. Oakes steers a middle course, detailing the on-the-ground activities of slaves and Union soldiers while arguing that historians have neglected the role of Republican legislators, whom he sees as determined from the beginning that the Civil War would not only restore the Union but abolish slavery.

“There’s too m! uch hyperbole in the way we talk about Lincoln,” Mr. Oakes writes. “He was neither the Great Emancipator who bestrode his times and brought his people out of the darkness, nor was he in any way a reluctant emancipator held back by some visceral commitment to white supremacy. In the evolution of wartime antislavery policy, Lincoln was neither quicker nor slower than Republican legislators. Instead they seemed to move in tandem.”

In an e-mail interview with Salon, Mr. Oakes praised aspects of the Spielberg movie but questioned the scene where Lincoln had to bring conservative and radical Republicans into line to pass the Thirteenth Amendment in January 1865. In fact, he argued, the Republicans were united all along, as evidenced by the vote on the amendment the previous July, which failed despite drawing only one Republican “no” vote (in what Mr. Oakes characterized as a procedural maneuver).

Full emancipation, M.. Oakes argues in “Freedom National,” was part of Republican policy from the beginning of the war, rather than one arrived at as a “military necessity,” as Lincoln later said of the Emancipation Proclamation. The party, he writes, “never had to move from union to emancipation because the two issues â€" liberty and union â€" were never separate for them.”

Mass for a Homeless Man

Dear Diary:

I attended a funeral Mass in December, at St. Joseph’s Church on East 87th Street, for a homeless man named Jose Perez.

For several years, Mr. Perez had wheeled a shopping cart to a corner on 87th Street near a supermarket. The cart was packed with belongings and, on top of a blanket, was Shorty, a small dog of indeterminate mixture, one part of which was Corgi.

After making a contribution to Mr. Perez’s cup, we’d talk baseball. He was a big Yankee fan and read the sports section of a donated newspaper every day. The relationship was not one-sided. When he learned that my son was a Yankee fan, he gave me a World Series scorecard to send to him.

And once he gave me a beautiful tool, whose parts fit like a little jigsaw puzzle, when I told him I was a retired engineer.

I always gave Shorty a good belly scratching, and when he saw me coming his little tail would wag prestissimo.

Around Thanksgiving, the cart failed to appear. I was worried when a week pased. Then I saw three women at his usual spot, in agitated conversation. From them I learned that Jose Perez had died, and no one knew what had happened to Shorty.

Within days, the area became a kind of shrine. Flowers were tacked to the wall, sympathy cards, handwritten notes of farewell. And an announcement of the Mass on Dec. 22 at St. Joseph’s.

When a neighbor and I arrived, we wondered how many people might attend. We were pleased to see about 30 people on the sidewalk, gathered about Shorty, who was wearing a warm woolen sweater. When he saw me, Shorty came over and let me scratch his ears. Then he went from person to person, greeting every one.

A friend of Jose Perez told me he was taking care of Shorty.

After the service began, I looked around. There were at least 200 mourners. The priest saying the Mass spoke of Christ’s attitude toward the poor, the inheritors of the Earth.

And he interrupted the Mass to go to Shorty in the front pew and pet him fondly.

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