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- Rain, Blood, Mud — How The Broadway Staging Of “The Outsiders” Handles All The Fluids And Fists In The Climactic Brawl
“Staging that key three minutes of the show’s meticulously choreographed, highly anticipated climax, is a technical feat involving more than 100 gallons of water and unwavering physical acumen on the part of the cast.” – Los Angeles Times (Yahoo!)
- Our Billionaire Problem
Where billionaires in the past operated in the physical world, ushered in societal change as a byproduct of their innovation, and used their sizable largesses to try uplifting lives, today’s billionaires stretch the limits of technological reality (and law) with sheer glee, with a meagre spirit of altruism. – The Walrus
- Audible Introduces Interactive Features To Its Audiobooks
“On Thursday, the Amazon-owned company introduced three new features that will allow listeners to explore a book’s characters, engage in interactive stories, and view additional imagery and bonus information about landmarks or places mentioned in the book.” Unfortunately, for now this all is available with only one title. – TechCrunch
- Guggenheim Bilbao Gets A High Profile Expansion
The striking, €45m project in which Foster + Partners has worked with the eminent Basque architect Luis María Uriarte, has been described as a “floating pavilion” and will double the current exhibition space in the museum, to around 6,000 sq. m, and will also remodel 8,000 sq. m of existing galleries. – The Art Newspaper
- Cleaning Up Our Conservation Harms
Conservators face a particular challenge: how to ensure that preserving the past does not compromise the future. – The Art Newspaper
- Explain This Trend: Building New Stately English Mansions That Look Like They’ve Been There Forever
Featuring elegant proportions, hand-carved cornicing, expansive stone doorsteps and porches, and with a flourish of columns, this house and others like it have all been built in recent years – but without a backstory of beheaded queens or servant entourages. Welcome to the world of houses built to look like they’ve always been there. – BBC (MSN)
- Why David Hallberg Is Nervous About Bringing The Australian Ballet To New York
“This is absolutely the city — audiences, presenters, critics — that knows me best” he said. “And there is no denying that eyes will be on how I have guided and how I am presenting the company that I have directed for six years.” – The New York Times
- The Midnight Express: NBA Finalist for Nonfiction<a href="https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/2026/10/the-midnight-express-nba-finalist-for-nonfiction.html" title="The Midnight Express: NBA Finalist for Nonfiction” rel=”nofollow”>We’ve
- Who Owns An Orchestra When It Goes Away?
Harmonium, founded by pianist and conductor Jeffrey Kahane after he stepped down as the Philharmonic’s music director earlier this year, begins its orchestral life Friday at the Lila Cockrell Theatre. Its emergence poses an unusual question: when an orchestra disappears, who — if anyone — inherits it? – San Antonio Current
- What The Kennedy Center Was And Why It Closed
“I was a vice president at that arts center in Washington, and I can tell you that maintenance is almost certainly not why it closed its doors last month.” – Los Angeles Times (Yahoo)
- The World Of Science Is Being Overwhelmed By New Studies
In 2025, academics worldwide published about 7 million scholarly articles – that’s more than 19,000 each day. On the surface, that might seem like a number to celebrate, but it also poses a problem. As the volume of research balloons, it can be hard to discern what these millions of papers actually tell us. – Aeon
- Is The Reason The Voynich Manuscript Is So Confounding Because The Pages Are Out Of Order?
“In … peer-reviewed journal Digital Medievalist, (two researchers) argue that the manuscript’s folded sheets may have originally been piled on top of each other as ‘singulions’ – like a stack of Christmas cards – but were mis-bound in a more typical ‘nested’ arrangement at some point in the mid-to-late 15th century.” – The Guardian
- Alabama Governor Dismisses Five Members Of The State’s Public TV Board
The move to dismiss the members came days after a survey conducted by the board showed support for Alabama Public Television continuing its relationship with the Public Broadcasting Service. Last October, two conservative members of the board brought the idea of disaffiliating from PBS. Barnett accused PBS of being “anathema” to President Donald Trump. – Alabama Reflector
- The Dazzling Physical Afterlife Of The Ancient Pharaohs
Of all the priorities that governed ancient-Egyptian life, perhaps the hardest for us to fathom is the expenditure on the afterlife, not merely as a place of immaterial spiritual reward, but as a world of material goods. – The Atlantic
- The People Who Resist New Technology
Call them legacy users, or upgrade holdouts. They’ve clung to iPhones with home buttons, Bush-era computers, and headphones older than some tech CEOs, even when doing so impedes their ability to complete everyday tasks like emailing or navigation. – The Atlantic
- Referrals From Google To Media Websites Have Plummeted, But Overall Page Views Have Held Fairly Steady. How Come?
“Direct traffic is taking a larger share, internal recirculation is up and private sharing through texts, DMs and apps like WhatsApp has surged. Meanwhile, publishers’ most loyal readers are generating more pageviews than they did two years ago. The catch: Publishers are attracting fewer new readers.” – A Media Operator
- City Of New York Doubles Its Grants To Individual Artists
“Rising from $5,000 to up to $10,000, the increase … represents the first change in this funding stream in some 20 years. The funding comes from the Department of Cultural Affairs and is distributed to each borough’s arts councils, which act as regrant partners and dole out grants to individual artists annually.” – ARTnews
- Robert Rauschenberg’s New York Loft/Studio Is For Sale. Should It Be Saved?
The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation clearly doesn’t think so: not only has it listed the Soho building he bought in 1966, it has already sold the house on Florida’s Captiva Island where he spent his final decades. (A resort developer bought that property for $45 million.) – The New York Times
- Plans Revealed For $250 Million Arts District In Historically Black Neighborhood In Chicago
The Bronzeville Legacy Collective says it has already raised $75 million toward its goal: a campus with museums dedicated to the gospel music, blues legend Muddy Waters, and Emmett Till; a center for Black dance; a theater with a resident company; a recreational trail; and an arts and culture center. – WBEZ (Chicago)
- Whitney Museum And Staffers Agree On Contract Just Hours Before Strike Deadline
“Under the new contract, every Whitney employee will receive a wage increase of at least 14.75% over four years. Workers with the lowest salaries will receive larger raises, ranging from 5% to 23% in the first year.” The settlement came in time to avoid disruption of the museum’s major Roy Lichtenstein retrospective. – ARTnews
- San Antonio’s Newest Orchestra Makes A Crowd-Pleasing Debut
Harmonium of Texas — made up largely of musicians from the long-defunct San Antonio Symphony and the now-probably-defunct San Antonio Philharmonic, and co-founded by former SA Phil music director Jeffrey Kahane — gave its first performance on Friday, three days after what’s left of the Philharmonic sued Harmonium. – San Antonio Express-News (Yahoo!)
- Jeffrey Archer — Bestselling Novelist, Tory Politician, Convicted Felon — Is Dead At 86
“Possessed of huge drive, vast wealth and immense personal charm, Archer bounced back from disaster and, more than once, rebuilt a shattered life. But for all his talents, he will be remembered as a man affected by a defective moral compass, whose public humiliation was entirely self-inflicted.” – BBC (MSN)
- Oracle Pays $10 Million for Nashville Symphony’s Season
Good Morning,
Oracle is giving the Nashville Symphony $10 million, reinstating a season the orchestra cancelled a week earlier and ending furloughs of 77 musicians and 27 staff that were to begin Oct. 18 (The New York Times). Music director Leonard Slatkin, who had just conducted three sold-out concerts, was as surprised as anyone.
Adults and teens are now 40 percent of Build-A-Bear’s customers, and its stock rose more than 2,000 percent between 2020 and 2025 (The New Yorker). The NHL is courting a different crowd with 60-to-90-second romance-novel teasers about players like the Flyers’ Trevor Zegras. Emily Rath, a best-selling hockey romance novelist the league approached, says she never turned down an offer so fast (Wired).
At the South Sound Powwow in Graham, Washington, Shawn Reynolds, a Puyallup Tribe member, persuaded organizers to hold a dance where participants could skip regalia, keep headphones on and bring caregivers. His 11-year-old autistic twin sons led the procession (OPB).
In 1926 Edison told the New York Times that radio was a fad and the phonograph would win listeners back. The BBC began broadcasting the Proms the next year, when the festival’s finances were threatening its survival (Classical Music). They’ve going ever since.
All of our stories below.
- Oracle Gives $10M To Help Save The Nashville Symphony
The gift will allow the symphony to resume the season, which runs through June 2027, and to retain staff, Mark Tillinger, Nashville Symphony’s president and chief executive, said in a news release on Sunday. – The New York Times
- Why More Adults Are Playing With Kids Toys
“People just stay very playful for a longer period of time. And it’s cross-brand. You know, it might be Teddy bears. It might be Lego bricks. It might be Transformers. It might be Barbie dolls.” – The New Yorker
- Will We Still Need Punctuation When Machines Are Writing?
What are those commas doing there, anyway? By modern usage, they should mark off a non-restrictive clause, but they don’t. Nor are they marking items in a series or natural pauses in speech. – The New Yorker
- Musical Instruments Are Getting More Expensive
The consequences have reverberated across the country. Higher instrument prices are a particular threat to lower-income districts where enrollment and budgets are shrinking. – The New York Times
- The NFL Is Trying To Woo New Fans With Its Own Romance Writing
That is … not going well (though romance readers are still gaga for M/M, W/W, and M/W hockey tales from more traditional channels). Fans “see the stories as cheap pandering that fails to engage with female and LGBTQ hockey fans’ concerns about homophobia and toxic masculinity in the sport.” – Wired
- Can A Movie Make A Global Difference?
“In the coming weeks, NAZA will continue its rollout to theaters across the U.S., and this week it hit No. 1 at the Italian box office, surpassing Avengers: Endgame.” – Vulture
- If You Can’t Hold It, You Don’t Own It
Physical media are really making a comeback in the era of streaming services removing series and movies at (seemingly) random, book censorship, and AI music. – The Guardian (UK)
- Authoritarian Politics Are Threatening Culture Worldwide
In addition to established understandings of intrinsic esthetic and historic values of heritage, new emphasis on development reconceptualizes heritage as a resource that can generate economic development, tourism, employment and social cohesion. – The Conversation
- What, Exactly, Is Literary Substack?
As Substack has become a more respectable platform and mainstream academics have begun to join in some numbers, they have encountered a strange simulacrum of fields they thought they knew intimately. Cultural and symbolic capital seem to work differently here. – Paroxysms
- Smithsonian Is Using AI To Help Interpret Its Collection
The goal is to allow the public and scholars to both search the institution’s collection and draw connections across the Smithsonian and other organizations, such as the Library of Congress, to gain a deeper sense of how communities formed and functioned at the nation’s birth. – AP News
- How Ravinia Reconfigured Itself
The pavilion reopened partway through the 2026 summer season after two seasons of design and construction, then quickly began demonstrating its newfound flexibility. – Architect Magazine
- How AI Might Help Humanize Museums
In addition to museum workers, of course, the public and artists are already using AI, which means that AI is already affecting any museum’s digital strategy, ability to attract visitors, understanding of the ever-changing art world, and capacity to fulfill its mission. Avoidance is not an option. – ReMuseum