As one cast member puts it, "After a couple of months … the fairy dust fades away, and you see your friends and people you really care about hurting and burnt out and not able to pay their rent." - Los Angeles Times (MSN)
The city has 360,000 residents, only 40,000 of whom live in the historic center, but receives 11 million tourists each year. Cecilie Hollberg, director of the Galleria dell' Accademia (where Michelangelo's David is located), suggests the city try a larger version of the crowd-control measures she's introduced at the museum. - The Guardian
Even a hard-nosed economic perspective suggests that arts provision warrants support, rather than a freeze. By the government’s own estimates, the creative industries contribute around £126 billion to the UK economy. That’s more than the car industry, for instance, or aerospace, oil and gas. - The Conversation
The plan wouldn’t expand Disney’s footprint in tourism-dependent Anaheim but would help it add rides and entertainment by letting the company relocate parking to a new multi-story structure and redevelop the massive lot, as well as make other changes to how it uses its properties. - AP
To regular people, raising the price of something precisely when we need it the most is the definition of predatory behavior. To an economist, it is the height of rationality: a signal to the market to produce more of the good or service, and a way to ensure that whoever needs it the most can pay to get it....
The Republic of Benin — one of the two long-and-narrow countries wedged between Ghana and Nigeria — plans to spend €250 million to put culture alongside agriculture as the pillars of its economy. Four museums are under construction in various cities, as is a larger arts complex in Cotonou. - The Art Newspaper
The agency is preparing to file an antitrust lawsuit against the Ticketmaster parent in the coming weeks that would allege the nation’s biggest concert promoter has leveraged its dominance in a way that undermined competition for ticketing live events, according to people familiar with the matter. - The Wall Street Journal
"People who think they are left-wing but put a line between who gets to talk and who should shut up are right-wing. … People who think they are progressive but force us to talk about what we experienced, and only about what we experienced, are violent." - Jacobin
“A lot of young people are moving away from conventional ideas of education and the workforce to pursuing things we genuinely enjoy in life. “We know what’s best for us – we’re willing to stand up and say ‘this is our future, we’re not going to allow our lives to be dictated’.” - The Guardian
A common vacation itinerary includes three or four days at Disney World and one or two days at Universal. If Universal can now persuade families to spend one more day at its parks instead of at Disney, it could nab hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue. - The Wall Street Journal
That’s because Scottish filmmakers, writers, and artists are feeling vulnerable "following the closure of a film project, a book festival and an art magazine within days of each other." - The Observer (UK)
Birmingham is a bellwether for the UK. Nothing “could be more emblematic of the way that Britain currently devalues life: when we only focus on our most basic needs, dismissing leisure, art, literature and culture as something decadent and middle-class, we do ourselves an injustice.” - The Observer (UK)
The abuse child actors dealt with destroyed their childhoods and families - and people watching it are grappling with their childhood memories as well. Then there’s the apparent negligence of Nickelodeon. - Slate
"Believe me, when they get the LGBTQ books out of there, then it'll be the books on the Civil War because white people are portrayed in a poor light. And then it'll be books on religions that are different from their own. There's no stopping these people." - NPR
