(Lee J. Cobb and Mildred Dunnock in the original Broadway production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, 1949).
In a guest essay in the New York Times, former Washington Post theater critic Naveen Kumar writes that “Broadway is Serving Up Liberal Comfort Food.”
His piece concludes:
Not everyone goes to the theater hoping to be confronted with big questions, the kind that compel audiences to...
This notion that the ultimate measure of American educational value is economic is an impoverishing one. We measure for success. If that measure is earnings then we optimize for earnings. Social value measured on an earnings scale doesn't just get deprioritized, it doesn't exist.
Andrew Joslyn, Associate Director of Popular Programming at the Seattle Symphony, shares the unique impact of relevant programming in building community.
My introduction of Gary Dunning at New England Conservatory’s Commencement ceremony on Sunday May 17, 2026. He received an honorary degree.
Let me speak of Gary Dunning who has spent decades reminding Boston — and reminding this country, demonstrating — that the arts are not a luxury. They are a lifeline.
Gary Dunning has led one of Boston’s most admired cultural...
The Kennedy Center is a treasure. Not just for what it has been, but because of what it represents. But the practicalities of providing a roof for a bunch of artistic enterprises that essentially have nothing much to do with one another — or worse, having to squabble dysfunctionally among themselves for resources — are an argument for the need for something better.
It's a wonder that the most intriguing publisher of American poets of the Beat Generation happens to be a German publisher, Stadtlichter Presse. Its "Heartbeat" series features not only the most notable Beats — Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Corso, and Ferlinghetti — in bilingual editions, but dozens of less famous Beats and Beat-era or Beat-related eminences as well.
What Google presented this month was revolutionary, a declaration that the web as we know it is dead, and an operating manual for how the new web will work. More important, it suggests how we all will find — or fail to find — culture over the next decade.
Neil Barclay, President & CEO of the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, talks the evolving landscape for BIPOC organizations and avenues for sustainability.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=7bhDcSZYZUs&version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent Esther van Zyl as Alma Mahler in my play “The Marriage,” as performed at Colorado Mahlerfest two
On the weekend John Ganz had an interesting discussion of our rich tech-elites and aesthetic taste, of which they have little, and who would hope to destroy what for now remains that is human and beautiful. This leads him to consider Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1790) and Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979), where the latter book’s title...
Hollywood has reinvented its core model at least six times in a century. The nonprofit arts model has reinvented itself exactly once. Now there may no choice. But what's the case?
