Good Morning,
The story we keep telling ourselves is that the audience is evaporating. Today’s stories argue otherwise. Public radio’s combined audience across five noncommercial formats is up 9.6% in two years — even as (because?) its funding gets fought over (InsideRadio). Americans do read less than they did forty years ago, but The Bulwark makes a decent case that’s diversification, not decline. And Christopher Nolan’s film didn’t replace Homer — it sold him. Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey was briefly the second-bestselling book of any kind in the country (Slate).
Some of that appetite is physical. The Guardian on the neuroscience of concerts: collective effervescence needs bodies in the same room on the same beat, which no feed can counterfeit. A cousin of that instinct in Psyche, where handwriting a letter becomes a deliberate act of slowness.
What’s under strain is the contract beneath all of it — publishers now pressed to guarantee what readers used to assume, that a person wrote the book (Christian Science Monitor). Meanwhile the shuttered UArts building in Philadelphia becomes affordable artist housing (Hyperallergic). A dead institution recycled into what artists actually needed from it.
Also, Ljubljana has opened a Bullshit Museum (The Guardian). Refreshingly honest premise for a cultural institution.
All of our stories below.