“Whenever Amazon sells a Bonnier e-book, it collects 30 percent of the retail price. But now Amazon wants its share hiked to 50 percent. So far, Bonnier is refusing to budge.”

“The ACE have the arrogance to declare that London vs the rest of the UK is an equal match worth fighting, and one in which funds can be distributed equally between the two. The extensive nature of their report proves that despite their attempts to disguise the vicious nature of the cuts with a garish pink font, the ACE cannot claim ignorance about the existence of a 14:1 imbalance of London’s arts budget compared to the rest of England.”

“New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña announced on Tuesday their plan to put $23 million toward hiring 120 new arts teachers and boosting arts resources in public schools across the city. The plan uses additional money from this year’s budget to guarantee the growth of arts programs in 2015.”

“The new, spectacular opera house, the third largest in the world, with state-of-the-art acoustic design, seating for 1250, three stages, and a vast backstage area as big as an aircraft hangar (to enable the creation of the most elaborate possible sets, no expense spared), is in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan.”

Wolf Trap will announce Tuesday that it will use new supertitle technology that allows audiences to follow the French narrative of the opera in English from their smartphones, tablets or Google Glass eyewear. The technology from Figaro Systems debuts during the July 25 performance of “Carmen.”

“Overall, 33 organisations have been removed from the Arts Council’s roster and three quarters of the 670 organisations have had their funding frozen. The ENO has had its annual grant cut from £17.2m in 2014/15 to £12.4m in the next financial year.”

“GE has used sites like The Economist and Quartz for native advertising to promote itself as a supporter of innovation. But its biggest and most visible effort to date came in March with the introduction of Pressing, a policy news hub that pulls in content from millennial-aimed Vox, where Pressing made a splash as a launch sponsor.”

Even after taking practice out of the equation, “over three-quarters of the genetic variance in music accomplishment remained,” they report. This means that the aforementioned “genetically influenced propensities” to practice “are not sufficient to explain all of the genetic influences on accomplishment.”

“I don’t buy the idea that if our arts organizations die, so will our ability to access art. We’ve seen for more than 2 millennia that art arises from a fundamental human need to both create, and consume, transformative experiences. That will continue for another 2 millennia regardless of our organizational structures or legal tax status.”

The Russian capital’s myriad cultural and history sites – from the Taganka Theater5 to the Bolshoi to the writers’ union clubhouse in The Master and Margarita – have signs posted with codes that lead to a surprisingly rich web site (available to people at home, too) full of history, maps, biographies, and gossip.

“Harl recalled two mounds in the town of Fenton, Missouri, that were leveled to build a Walmart. The site of a 1,000-year-old village in Bridgeton, Missouri, was flattened to build an industrial park.”

“American results on the literacy and technology tests were somewhat better, in the sense that they were only mediocre.”

“That the most rapidly expanding U.S. metro area is a Manhattan-sized retirement village — with more golf carts than New York has taxis — highlights the transformation of the world’s demographic profile. The over-60 set — which the United Nations projects will almost triple to 2 billion by 2050 — offers opportunity to marketers and homebuilders even as it confounds governments that must care for an aging populace.”

“The fact is that by focusing exclusively on monetary issues, the current conversation prevents us not only from remembering the higher objectives of an undergraduate education, but also from recognizing just how bad a job our institutions have been doing at fulfilling them. Colleges and universities have a lot to answer for; if they want to regain the support of the larger society, they need to prove that they are worthy of it.”

“While technology has often been hailed as the great equalizer of educational opportunity, a growing body of evidence indicates that in many cases, tech is actually having the opposite effect: It is increasing the gap between rich and poor, between whites and minorities, and between the school-ready and the less-prepared.”

“Congress approved the recopyrighting, limited to foreign works, to align U.S. policy with an international copyright treaty. But the Golan plaintiffs—a group that includes educators, performers, and film archivists—argue that bigger principles are at stake. Does Congress have the constitutional right to remove works from the public domain? And if it does, what’s stopping it from plucking out even more freely available works?”

The formerly run-down Balfron Tower public housing project in East London, where artists are being given temporary leases as the complex is being converted to higher-end apartments, is the latest high-profile example of a process that “presents regeneration not through its long-term effects – the transfer of residency from poor to rich – but as a much shorter journey from neglect to creativity.”

“A new book of research reveals that civic leaders and arts patrons tend to fall prey to specific planning fallacies when it comes to building new museums, performing-arts centers, and cultural expansions.”

“The directive puts the burden of proof of how the ivory was obtained on the instrument owner instead of on federal agents. They don’t have to prove anything. All they have to say is, ‘You don’t have the right documentation,’ and your object is gone.”

“Philadelphia’s art funding has been through a tumultuous period the last few years, with major foundations like Annenberg moving to Los Angeles, the Pew Charitable Trusts – which funds the Center for Arts and Heritage – moving to Washington D.C., and the William Penn Foundation putting a lot of its money behind audience development.”

“After talking about renovations for more than a decade, business and arts leaders say, quick action is needed to prevent the buildings from falling further into disrepair and to avoid ever-higher maintenance and construction costs.”

“In our agreement, the News & Record has committed to publishing at least 70 stories about local arts topics during the next year. That’s 70 more stories than we would have published without this agreement.”

Laurie Gwen Shapiro travels to Historic Jamestowne for the 400th anniversary reenactment of Pocahontas’s wedding to English settler John Rolfe – and finds the chieftain’s daughter is still important to a surprising variety of individuals, from tourism officials (of course) to archaeologists to First-Families-of-Virginia aristocrats to native tribes still trying to get Federal recognition.

Scott Timberg argues that the late American Top 40 host has ” been drafted posthumously into a war he never fought, and become a symbol in a debate in which he never took a side.”

“After the controversy re-emerged this weekend, Iveri issued a statement saying she was ‘shocked and saddened to be called homophobic’ – and that it wasn’t her fault.”

“Virtually all of society’s problems are problems that both originate in the cities and are being solved there.”

As executive director of the Arts for L.A., Danielle Brazell’s job “included regularly prodding City Hall to spend more money and pay more attention to L.A.’s nonprofit arts scene.” Now she’ll be the one getting the prods.

The legacy of the “culture of poverty” has made a generation of Americans shy away from difficult questions around culture and achievement. The best way to repent is not to continue ignoring these questions, but to insist upon a more rigorous and detailed examination of them—more than the Tiger Mom herself can provide.

The former managing director of the BBC World Service and the Barbican Arts Centre “urges them to stop adopting the political jargon that distorts what art is, to refuse to reduce ticket prices to seduce a new public, and to stop moaning.”