AJ Four Ways: Text Only (by date) | headlines only
DANCE
IDEAS
- Juneteenth Is A Big Deal In Parts Of Mexico
Why? It all goes back to enslaved people escaping their captors across the South, and fleeing to Spanish-controlled Florida. – NBC News
- Why Are We So Obsessed With Aliens?
“You can keep it pretty simple. There are the alien movies where the aliens come in peace and the alien movies where the aliens do not come in peace.” – NPR
- The 91-Year-Old Venezuelan Artist Says No To Weaving With Electronic Machines
“Mora, who is 91 and tiny, wearing head scarves around her weathered face, has clung to a mix of ancestral Indigenous and Spanish traditions.” – The New York Times
- Where Did This Family’s Looted Artworks Go?
“Despite evidence that Neumann did appropriate the Zoellners’ furniture and paintings, he was not convicted; in 1947 he was deported from the Netherlands as an ‘enemy subject’ under the Nazi regime, and emigrated to the United States with his family.” – El País English
- As The Knicks Win, All Of New York City Becomes A Dance Stage
“Of all the joy blooming throughout the Knicks championship run, the most visible has been the jubilant transfer of energy from body to body.” – The New York Times
ISSUES
- The 91-Year-Old Venezuelan Artist Says No To Weaving With Electronic Machines
“Mora, who is 91 and tiny, wearing head scarves around her weathered face, has clung to a mix of ancestral Indigenous and Spanish traditions.” – The New York Times
- Where Did This Family’s Looted Artworks Go?
“Despite evidence that Neumann did appropriate the Zoellners’ furniture and paintings, he was not convicted; in 1947 he was deported from the Netherlands as an ‘enemy subject’ under the Nazi regime, and emigrated to the United States with his family.” – El País English
- How David Hockney Celebrated, Sometimes Mischeviously, Gay Life
“What’s so revolutionary about Hockney’s paintings is not just that they portray male nudity and desire, but scenes of domesticity: men swimming, showering and brushing their teeth together.” – The Guardian (UK)
- The Sensual, Forbidden Pleasures Of Touching Art
“One of the cardinal rules of museum-going is that art should be enjoyed from a comfortable distance and never touched. However, in the 1960s, a cohort of artists began inviting audiences to interact with, and thus alter, their works.” – Aeon
- This Los Angeles Museum Knows How WWII Shaped Global Soccer
As the men’s World Cup gets underway, LA’s Holocaust Museum has a show on the “beautiful game” that “shines a light on the important but largely overlooked relationship between Jewish life and the global game” – and how WWII changed everything. – Los Angeles Times (MSN)
MEDIA
- They Just Had To Take That Man’s Name Off The Kennedy Center From Behind A Curtain
After blowing the deadline and begging for more time – and being denied – workers took Donald J. Trump’s name off the Kennedy Center on Friday night. But “a spokeswoman for the center, said the institution was … evaluating ‘legal options.’” – The New York Times
- Kennedy Center As De-Trumpification Warning
Trump’s threat to walk away from the Kennedy Center suggests an additional danger: He could lose interest and doze off, as if at yet another Cabinet meeting or NBA Finals game, leaving parts of the government to fend for themselves. – The Atlantic
- Trump Kennedy Center Board Appeals Judge’s Order On Removing Trump’s Name
The board voted Thursday to seek a stay of U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper’s May 29 ruling that said Trump’s name was illegally added to the Kennedy Center. – NPR
- International African-American Museum Institutes Rolling Furloughs For All Employees
Just under three years after opening, the museum on Charleston’s waterfront is facing financial troubles severe enough that all staffers, including senior executives, are taking mandatory 20-day unpaid furloughs on a staggered schedule from July through December. The IAAM will remain open throughout this period. – WCIV (Charleston)
- Demand For Workers With Creative Skills Is Growing
Nearly 50% of employers are looking to expand their workforce in the next three to five years. Video games, music, design and fashion were particularly expecting to grow over that time. – The Conversation
MUSIC
- If People Aren’t Reading, Why Are Bookstores Thriving?
“The bookstore boom is a story about a certain educated, culturally aspirational demographic doing what it has always done, while the literacy crisis unfolds elsewhere, namely in under-resourced schools, rural communities, and households without the discretionary income to browse a charming bookshop on a Saturday afternoon.” – LitHub
- Ruth Ozeki Knows The Power Of A Good Book
And that good book is Charlotte’s Web. – The Guardian (UK)
- If You Want To Read More Books This Summer, Here’s How To Do It
“I have this daydream where I go to the park and read under a tree. The sun is shining. It’s not too hot. The ground beneath me is comfortable. I have snacks on hand, I’m hydrated, and I am captivated by the book in front of me.” – NPR
- Debut Authors Take Home Women’s Prize For Fiction, Nonfiction
The fiction award is well-known (as is, in this case, the award winner), but the Women’s Prize added the nonfiction award in 2023 to help redress an imbalance in nonfiction award winners in the UK. – The Guardian (UK)
- Oh, The Drama: Someone Tries To Trademark A Bookstagram Term, And It Does Not End Well
Can ‘Hot Girls Read’ be trademarked? One creator thought so. “She is using the trademarking this common phrase to retroactively target small businesses who very likely had the idea before her, or at the very least had it around the same time as her.” – Slate
PEOPLE
- Juneteenth Is A Big Deal In Parts Of Mexico
Why? It all goes back to enslaved people escaping their captors across the South, and fleeing to Spanish-controlled Florida. – NBC News
- Why Are We So Obsessed With Aliens?
“You can keep it pretty simple. There are the alien movies where the aliens come in peace and the alien movies where the aliens do not come in peace.” – NPR
- The 91-Year-Old Venezuelan Artist Says No To Weaving With Electronic Machines
“Mora, who is 91 and tiny, wearing head scarves around her weathered face, has clung to a mix of ancestral Indigenous and Spanish traditions.” – The New York Times
- Where Did This Family’s Looted Artworks Go?
“Despite evidence that Neumann did appropriate the Zoellners’ furniture and paintings, he was not convicted; in 1947 he was deported from the Netherlands as an ‘enemy subject’ under the Nazi regime, and emigrated to the United States with his family.” – El País English
- As The Knicks Win, All Of New York City Becomes A Dance Stage
“Of all the joy blooming throughout the Knicks championship run, the most visible has been the jubilant transfer of energy from body to body.” – The New York Times
PEOPLE
- Juneteenth Is A Big Deal In Parts Of Mexico
Why? It all goes back to enslaved people escaping their captors across the South, and fleeing to Spanish-controlled Florida. – NBC News
- Why Are We So Obsessed With Aliens?
“You can keep it pretty simple. There are the alien movies where the aliens come in peace and the alien movies where the aliens do not come in peace.” – NPR
- The 91-Year-Old Venezuelan Artist Says No To Weaving With Electronic Machines
“Mora, who is 91 and tiny, wearing head scarves around her weathered face, has clung to a mix of ancestral Indigenous and Spanish traditions.” – The New York Times
- Where Did This Family’s Looted Artworks Go?
“Despite evidence that Neumann did appropriate the Zoellners’ furniture and paintings, he was not convicted; in 1947 he was deported from the Netherlands as an ‘enemy subject’ under the Nazi regime, and emigrated to the United States with his family.” – El País English
- As The Knicks Win, All Of New York City Becomes A Dance Stage
“Of all the joy blooming throughout the Knicks championship run, the most visible has been the jubilant transfer of energy from body to body.” – The New York Times
THEATRE
VISUAL
- Juneteenth Is A Big Deal In Parts Of Mexico
Why? It all goes back to enslaved people escaping their captors across the South, and fleeing to Spanish-controlled Florida. – NBC News
- What America’s Treasure To Trash To Treasure Pipelines Say About All Of Us
After WWII, “single-family homes spread across the nation like fireweed. In a distinctively American architectural feature, many of them were joined to a small dungeon dedicated to the tidy storage of automobiles—and other items.” – The Atlantic
- Please! Bring Back The Gatekeepers
Gatekeeper, here, doesn’t mean the patriarchal bogeyman of progressive fever dreams. It means the picky curator who maintains a necessary membrane between your half-formed, typo-addled thoughts and the wider world. It means the tastemaker who triages opinions and batters the better ones into readable form. – The Walrus
- The Great Divide: Creativity Before And After AI
On one side are texts produced before the arrival of generative LLMs. On the other, everything that has followed—texts that might still be useful, even compelling, but that will always face a lingering suspicion of not being entirely human, of having been smoothed by systems trained to predict the word that comes next. – LA Review of Books
- Has The 21st Century Been A Creative Blank Space?
The years from 2000 to 2025 as a period of creative emptiness and stagnation so intractable that it will be remembered (or, rather, is being remembered, through the anticipation of remembrance) as voided time, a dark age. – Yale Review
