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The Kabuki Play Guide provides synopses and highlights of major works in the Kabuki canon for those interested in learning more about Kabuki theater.

A handy dictionary of kabuki terms, plays and characters from the Japan Arts Council.

Saw my first live kabuki performance today in Tokyo and absolutely loved it.

According to numbers provided Monday by the Fisheries Agency, 25 sei whales, 52 minke whales, and a staggering 150 Bryde’s whale are permitted to be caught through the end of the year—227 total whales over a mere sixth-month span. The IUCN Red List categorizes sei whales as endangered.

A good software architect, as well as a good project manager, doesn’t need meetings and never organizes them.

Meetings demotivate, waste time, burn money, and degrade quality. But more about that later. For now, let’s discuss a proposed alternative.

This is not to say that skill doesn’t matter — merely that in a competition in which all the leaders are highly skilled, randomness may explain the difference between triumph and failure. Good luck plus skill beats bad luck plus skill any time.

Like humans everywhere, Native Americans shaped their environments to suit them, through burning, pruning, tilling and other practices. And the Amazon is no different: Look closer, and you can see the deep impressions that humans have made on the world's largest tropical rainforest, scientists reported yesterday in the journal Science.

When Europe lost Latin as a shared communication tool, it was a new Babel Tower: Europeans couldn't understand each other any longer except within the boundaries of their national states. Not surprisingly, people who don't understand each other tend to resort to war to sort out conflicts. But Europeans also tried to replace Latin with some non-verbal tools: one was music. It is a long story that needs to be told from the beginning.

Standing out, rather than fitting in, could in fact be the smarter route to success. A phrase coined in a study published in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2014, the “red sneaker effect”, revealed we confer higher status and competence on mavericks versus conformists.

So we often perceive someone wearing clothing that deviates from the norm in professional settings as having higher ability, rank and respect than colleagues who conform to dress codes.

This is because diverging from the norm signals you have autonomy and can bear the cost of nonconformity – even if it costs you your job.

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But she found that in collective cultures,such as East Asia and Latin America, people prefer norm followers as leaders, because they may prioritise organisational goals over their own.