AJ Four Ways: Text Only (by date) | headlines only
DANCE
IDEAS
- Now Bollywood Has A Rival For The Spotlight In India’s Enormous Movie Industry
Bollywood, based in Bombay/Mumbai and producing movies in Hindi, has always been the center of India’s cinematic universe. Yet there are centers of filmmaking in other Indian languages based in other state capitals. One of those centers — Tollywood, which produces Telugu-language movies in Hyderabad — has been enjoying a big run of successes. – AP
- Countries Boycotting Eurovision Over Decision To Allow Israel To Compete
Ireland, Spain, the Netherlands and Slovenia will boycott the 2026 Eurovision Song Contest, after Israel was allowed to compete. – BBC
- Ailey Company Launches Its First Season Under Director Alicia Graf Mack
Mack, who did two stints as a principal dancer with the company (and got a master’s degree in-between), says her vision is to balance between Alvin Ailey’s own “powerful, visceral” choreography and new pieces by Fredrick Earl Mosley, Matthew Neenan, Jamar Roberts, and Urban Bush Women founder Jawole Willa Jo Zollar. – NPR
- Russia Blocks Facetime, Roblox
Both restrictions are part of an accelerating clampdown on foreign tech platforms: In the case of FaceTime, Russian authorities allege it is being used for criminal activity, while Roblox was accused of distributing extremist materials and “LGBT propaganda.” – CBC
- Is Appointment TV Making A Comeback?
As more shows switch to a weekly release schedule, it gives viewers a chance to watch the episodes as they become available and take part in the same cultural moment, but experts suggest what’s happening is more of a happy middle ground between appointment viewing and binge watching. – CBC
ISSUES
- “The Picasso Of India” Finally Has A Dedicated Museum — In Qatar
“More than a decade after his death, the Indian Modernist M.F. Husain is getting the monumental tribute he long imagined. Qatar” — where he lived in exile after repeated death threats from Hindu nationalists — “has unveiled a new museum dedicated entirely to the artist, … cementing his place in global art history.” – Artnet
- How The Amazing Sculptures In The Paris Catacombs Got There
An avid carver, Décure turned the Catacombs into his private workshop. Outside of working hours—during lunch breaks and before and after his shifts—he snuck off into a side-tunnel to chisel away at three small yet highly detailed sculptures. – Artnet
- Two More Of Abu Dhabi’s Extravagant New Museums Have Opened
The Zayed National Museum, designed by Norman Foster’s architecture firm, is one of the five museums planned for Saadiyat Island, the emirate’s purpose-built cultural district. The Natural History Museum, designed by the Dutch firm Mecanoo, features everything from meteorites to dinosaur skeletons to “Lucy.” – The Art Newspaper
- Dallas City Council Considers Leaving Its IM Pei-Designed City Hall
- The Art Developments That Defined 2025
All in all, an exhausting year. But—if you’ll permit me—a bit of hope? For every gallery that shut down or closed a location, another seemed to open. And, as art dealers reminded me all year, when the world gets dark, artists rise to the challenge, leading the way forward. – ARTnews
MEDIA
- Whistleblower Alleges That CEO Of Chicago’s Black History Museum Misused Funds, Abused Staff
The now-former vice president of education and programs at the DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center is suing the institution and its CEO, Perri Irmer, alleging misuse of public funds, harassment and retaliation. – WBEZ (Chicago)
- By The Numbers: How Arts Organizations Have Fared In The Past Six Years
Performing arts organizations experienced sharper drops in revenue and staffing in 2024 than museums or community organizations. – SMU Cultural Data
- This Major New Arts Center Is Almost Finished, On Time And On Budget. Even So, It May Not Open.
Kanal, on the edge of central Brussels, will feature a large museum, multiple performance venues, and an architecture center. It’s 95% complete and scheduled to open this time next year. Yet, thanks to widely expected budget cuts and a particularly Belgian kind of political dysfunction, Kanal’s prospects are in doubt. – The Guardian
- Russia Prepares To Declare Pussy Riot An “Extremist” Organization
“Russia’s prosecutor general opened a case against the feminist art group on Friday, November 28. The ‘extremist’ label, commonly deployed by the government as justification for stifling political opposition, would officially ban the collective’s activities in Russia.” – Hyperallergic
- Why We Need Systemic Support For Arts And Humanities
Arts and humanities scholarship is not an ornament, it is the record of what human minds have made, imagined and endured. To let those worlds fall quiet is to diminish what it means to be human. – Arts Professional
MUSIC
- What It Says About You When Your Accent Changes
Researchers studied Taylor Swift’s voice as a way of exploring a phenomenon called “second-dialect acquisition,” or the way people learn a new style of speaking. Moving from place to place is the most obvious circumstance that might cause someone’s accent to change, but people’s voices can also evolve when they enter into new relationships. – The Atlantic
- World’s Third-Busiest Public Library Faces Job Cuts, Accusations Of “Digital Vanity Projects”
The State Library of Victoria in Melbourne is Australia’s busiest, yet a restructuring is eliminating 39 jobs — including reducing the number of public-facing reference librarians by 60%. Meanwhile the SLV has worked on “digital experiences” like a rotating 3D model of legendary outlaw Ned Kelly’s helmet. – The Guardian
- How Did The Ancient Assyrian Library Of King Ashurbanipal Survive For 2,600 Years?
Oddly enough, the collection —well, the cuneiform clay tablets, not the papyrus — has come down to us today precisely because the Babylonians and Medes conquered and down Nineveh, the Assyrian capital, in 612 BC. – Artnet
- AI May Help To Preserve And Grow Endangered Arapaho Language
I first visited the Northern Arapaho people on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming in 1999. At that time, there were hundreds of speakers of the Arapaho language. Today, there are less than 100, and all are over the age of 70. – The Conversation
- Luigi Pirandello Was Once Considered One Of Europe’s Great Writers. Why Was He Forgotten?
His plays were produced and his books were read all over the Western world, and he won the Nobel for literature in 1943. How is it he’s disappeared from our bookshelves and stages? (His enthusiastic fascism certainly didn’t help.) There are still worthwhile, albeit depressing, lessons in his work. – The Nation (MSN)
PEOPLE
- Now Bollywood Has A Rival For The Spotlight In India’s Enormous Movie Industry
Bollywood, based in Bombay/Mumbai and producing movies in Hindi, has always been the center of India’s cinematic universe. Yet there are centers of filmmaking in other Indian languages based in other state capitals. One of those centers — Tollywood, which produces Telugu-language movies in Hyderabad — has been enjoying a big run of successes. – AP
- Countries Boycotting Eurovision Over Decision To Allow Israel To Compete
Ireland, Spain, the Netherlands and Slovenia will boycott the 2026 Eurovision Song Contest, after Israel was allowed to compete. – BBC
- Ailey Company Launches Its First Season Under Director Alicia Graf Mack
Mack, who did two stints as a principal dancer with the company (and got a master’s degree in-between), says her vision is to balance between Alvin Ailey’s own “powerful, visceral” choreography and new pieces by Fredrick Earl Mosley, Matthew Neenan, Jamar Roberts, and Urban Bush Women founder Jawole Willa Jo Zollar. – NPR
- Russia Blocks Facetime, Roblox
Both restrictions are part of an accelerating clampdown on foreign tech platforms: In the case of FaceTime, Russian authorities allege it is being used for criminal activity, while Roblox was accused of distributing extremist materials and “LGBT propaganda.” – CBC
- Is Appointment TV Making A Comeback?
As more shows switch to a weekly release schedule, it gives viewers a chance to watch the episodes as they become available and take part in the same cultural moment, but experts suggest what’s happening is more of a happy middle ground between appointment viewing and binge watching. – CBC
PEOPLE
- Now Bollywood Has A Rival For The Spotlight In India’s Enormous Movie Industry
Bollywood, based in Bombay/Mumbai and producing movies in Hindi, has always been the center of India’s cinematic universe. Yet there are centers of filmmaking in other Indian languages based in other state capitals. One of those centers — Tollywood, which produces Telugu-language movies in Hyderabad — has been enjoying a big run of successes. – AP
- Countries Boycotting Eurovision Over Decision To Allow Israel To Compete
Ireland, Spain, the Netherlands and Slovenia will boycott the 2026 Eurovision Song Contest, after Israel was allowed to compete. – BBC
- Ailey Company Launches Its First Season Under Director Alicia Graf Mack
Mack, who did two stints as a principal dancer with the company (and got a master’s degree in-between), says her vision is to balance between Alvin Ailey’s own “powerful, visceral” choreography and new pieces by Fredrick Earl Mosley, Matthew Neenan, Jamar Roberts, and Urban Bush Women founder Jawole Willa Jo Zollar. – NPR
- Russia Blocks Facetime, Roblox
Both restrictions are part of an accelerating clampdown on foreign tech platforms: In the case of FaceTime, Russian authorities allege it is being used for criminal activity, while Roblox was accused of distributing extremist materials and “LGBT propaganda.” – CBC
- Is Appointment TV Making A Comeback?
As more shows switch to a weekly release schedule, it gives viewers a chance to watch the episodes as they become available and take part in the same cultural moment, but experts suggest what’s happening is more of a happy middle ground between appointment viewing and binge watching. – CBC
THEATRE
VISUAL
- The Importance Of Style In Science
Style, as I see it, is much more idiosyncratic and manifests in scientists who may practice in the same field and utilize similar methods, but who nonetheless differ in the way they conduct and produce their work. – Undark
- Why We Shouldn’t Bring Back Gatekeepers
Put simply: Once established institutions lost the privilege to control the public conversation, they acquired an obligation to participate within it, which, so far, they have mostly failed to do. – Conspicuous Cognition
- When Our Machines Become Sentient, Will We Notice?
If an AI system were sentient, then the alignment paradigm, whereby AI activities are circumscribed entirely by human goals, becomes untenable. It would be ethically impermissible to subject the interests of a sentient AI system to human-defined goals. – 3 Quarks Daily
- How Civilizations Collapse
Today the conditions for apocalypticism—gaping inequality, pandemics, rapid technological development—are amply present. So perhaps it isn’t surprising that, over the past several years, a number of scholars and political figures have warned of a coming collapse, by which they tend to mean the destruction of the basic elements of society. – The Atlantic (MSN)
- Cliches Have Gotten A Bad Rap
While I agree that leaning on a cliché might be a prosaic get-out-of-jail-free card, I do think they get a bad rap. The general criticism is that clichés are lazy, which I can understand. Yet sometimes I feel like this feedback itself is lazy or one-dimensional. – Sydney Review of Books
