Yearly Archives: 2021
Australia’s Big Festivals Try To Play During COVID – With Mixed Success
Adelaide’s festivals were luckier than most. On the final Friday of last year’s season it was announced gatherings of more than 500 would be...
Is It Really Possible To Crowdsource Misinformation On Twitter?
This is not a fact-checking program, exactly, because it will not involve trained fact-checkers. Instead, participants in the Birdwatch pilot can identify tweets they...
What Exactly Constitutes A Good Female Body For Ballet?
Gia Kourlas: "For Lovette, a member of New York City Ballet since 2010, this pause from performance has brought some clarity. 'I'm not...
Needed Corrections In Explaining How The Brain Works
"As a neuroscientist, I see scientific myths about the brain repeated regularly in the media and corners of academic research. Three of them, in...
Streaming Music Is Big Business — So Why Do Classical Musicians Get So Little...
The payout to a musician from a Spotify subscriber is about $.003 per stream — and only one-fifteenth of that tiny figure for a...
What Happens To LA’s Black Culture When The Black Population Shrinks?
For many decades, Los Angeles had been known as a Black migrant "magnet." Folks came for the promise and the sunshine. The Black population...
Chris Barber, Trombonist Who Shaped Britain’s Jazz Scene, Dead At 90
" was one of the most accessible and charismatic figures to emerge from the New Orleans-inspired jazz revivalist movement that played such a significant...
What Galleries Learned About Selling Art Online This Year
Online Viewing Rooms have certain advantages: collectors like the price transparency many fairs have demanded, and gallerists enjoy saving money on costly flights, hotels,...
COVID Could Not Stop The Wooster Group
"They're our holy fools, who — even when no one is watching — keep the art's sacred fires burning. Rehearsal isn't so much a...
Italy Has Too Much Tourism. How To Fix? The Uffizi Has A Plan
Enter the Uffizi Diffusi project. Meaning "scattered Uffizi," it's a reimagining of Italy's "scattered hotel" concept, in which individual "rooms" are located in different...
Alt-Weeklies Looked Doomed Even Before The Pandemic. Here’s How Some Of Them Have Hung...
The structural troubles those papers were facing before 2020 were bad enough; then COVID shut down their main sources of ad revenue (performance venues,...
Why Do Asian Actors Keep Getting Overlooked For Awards, Even As The Films They’re...
Parasite got six Oscar nominations and four awards, none of them for any of its actors. That case continued a pattern that has held...
How Weird Are This Season’s Tony Awards Going To Be?
Weirder than ever before, no doubt. As the voters fill out their ballots this week and next, none of the shows they're considering have...
Read Nabokov’s Long-Lost Superman Poem, Now In Print At Last
"The Man of To-morrow's Lament" — written as the superhero's internal monologue as he walks through the city with Lois Lane, ruing that they...
Small-Scale Indoor Performances To Return To New York In April
" said that arts, entertainment and events venues can reopen April 2 at 33 percent capacity, with a limit of 100 people indoors or...
Louvre Gets Back 450-Year-Old Armor Stolen 39 Years Ago
"A military antiques expert alerted police after being called in to give advice regarding an inheritance in Bordeaux in January and becoming suspicious about...
Reviving Mosul’s Cultural Museum, Six Years After ISIS Destroyed It
It was six years ago last week that extremist forces rampaged through the place, smashing ancient Assyrian sculptures with sledgehammers, burning books, looting anything...
A Critic Reviews 125 Years Of The NYT’s Book Reviews
To wander through 125 years of book reviews is to endure assault by adjective. All the fatuous books, the frequently brilliant, the disappointing, the...
Lessons On How To Have An “Exquisitely Managed Career” By Philip Roth
"Its lessons include: never marry; have no children; lawyer up early; keep tight control of your cover designs; listen to the critics while scorning...
Why Working Digitally Will Be Here To Stay In The Theatre
“There are so many benefits to all this stuff, It’s going to make theatre more accessible. It’s going to help tackle the issue of...
The Toronto Star Bets The Future On A Casino
Torstar's new owners say they are branching into online gambling to help pay for those continuing efforts. "Doing this as part of Torstar will...
The Virtue Of Ethics
"Until quite recently there was a concern that ethical relativism had become the dominant cultural assumption, which meant that ethics was all just a...
The Unkindness Of Booing
"In nearly 50 years of musical life, I can count on the fingers of two hands the occasions on which I’ve heard boos erupt...
So Who Made Pantone The Boss Of Colors Anyway?
Pantone started out, under another name, as a printing company, and one of its employees, Larry Herbert, got tired of trying to figure out...
Dance Through The Mailbox
Audience members sit on stools in separated cubicles surrounding the stage, each with its own door and letter-drop slots through which they can watch...
