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The Best-Selling Romance Novelist’s Baroque Tale Of Her Husband Trying To Poison Her (Is It True?)
About five years ago, the lawsuit claims, her hair and teeth started falling out and she developed intense nausea, tremors, disorientation, bone loss, facial swelling, and a peculiar metallic taste in her mouth. Tests of her hair, blood, and nails appear to reveal that she’d had high levels of toxic heavy metals in her system, including lithium, barium, arsenic, and mercury. Her suit notes that her husband had taken out a hefty life-insurance policy on her and “stood to gain millions of dollars upon her demise.” – New York Magazine
Lin-Manuel Mirands’s Coming Back To Broadway
The show combines singing, rapping, comedy, beat-boxing and human percussion, with the performers taking suggestions from the audience to create “humorous bits, instantaneous songs and riffs, and fully realized musical numbers.” – Deadline
Arizona State University’s Project With James Turrell’s Roden Crater Says A Lot About Museums
As an artwork that encompasses a sprawling landmass as well as decades’ worth of crafting to customize it as a man-made offering to the cosmos, Roden Crater may be “an order of magnitude too great” for conventional means of art-world funding, said Michael Govan—whereas, “when a university comes in, they have particle accelerators. They see what Roden Crater is as an element of the university, and it makes sense, even by scale.” – ARTnews
The Radical Notion Of Harriet Tubman On The Twenty-Dollar Bill
Her expression is a stealthy contrast to the blank-eyed stare of Jackson, who would remain on the new twenty’s back side, demoted but not fully displaced. Should the bill one day materialize, the composition of Tubman and Jackson, two faces of the same vexed coin, would serve as an apt emblem of Americans’ habit of historical equivocation. White supremacists and abolitionists have no doubt that each contributed to the character of our country; there are “very fine people” on both sides of the bill. – The New Yorker
Why Paris Wants To Plant Forests Around Its Famous Landmarks
“Under a plan announced last week by Mayor Anne Hidalgo, thickets of trees will soon appear in what today are pockets of concrete next to landmark locations, including the Hôtel de Ville, Paris’s city hall; the Opera Garnier, Paris’s main opera house; the Gare de Lyon; and along the Seine quayside.” – CityLab
How The Baltimore Symphony Got Into Dire Straits
The Baltimore Sun obtained financial documents showing the orchestra’s fiscal health is in calamitous condition. Even factoring in additional state funding, the orchestra is projected to barely make payroll in July and August, according to cash forecasts for a 52-week season. The orchestra would likely end its fiscal year with an approximately $1.5 million deficit. – Baltimore Sun
Publishers Are Changing The Deals They Give To Libraries For Ebooks
“These days, the question driving the debate is whether publishers should sell ebooks to libraries at a higher price for a perpetual license, or at a lower price for a license that needs to be renewed,” with several major publishers moving from the former to the latter model. – Melville House
The Monastery Where Spanish Was Born
According to García Turza, if the Suso monks were the first to record the sounds of the Ibero-Romance language on the page, they are also responsible for the creation of the Spanish alphabet. – BBC
Not All Shrinking Cities Are Poor And Suffering (And A Few Are Positively Prospering)
Richard Florida looks at a study of shrinking American cities and breaks down a couple of myths about them, and about why some cities remain vibrant even as they lose population while others enter a downward spiral. – CityLab
The Success Problem: Is Your Happiness Dependant On It?
“Problems related to achieving professional success might appear to be a pretty good species of problem to have; even raising this issue risks seeming precious. But if you reach professional heights and are deeply invested in being high up, you can suffer mightily when you inevitably fall.” – The Atlantic
Method Acting And #MeToo: A Brief History
“At least three of the fathers of the American Method — Lee Strasberg, Sanford Meisner, and Elia Kazan — had reputations for treating men and women differently, as well as for treating both women actors and women characters as sex objects.” Holly L. Derr examines what these men did, how they justified it, and how the aftereffects linger on. – HowlRound
Allegations Of Sexual Abuse Of Operatic Proportions
“Whether a visiting music director joining one production at a time, or in his regular capacity as Resident Conductor at several opera companies, he brings musically impeccable credentials, a flair with the baton, and a reputation for finding and cultivating exciting young talent. Countless reviews testify to his well-acknowledged musical talents. Behind the scenes, however, lies a much darker story.” – Twin Cities Arts Reader
‘The Wild Bunch’: At 50, It’s Aged Disturbingly Well
“[Sam] Peckinpah’s notion that mercy and virtue may be outmoded ideas in the hectic, grabby sprawl of the 20th century has ossified into prophecy as we’ve rolled into the 21st. … His work resonates wherever betrayal can be adopted as an acceptable strategy for success.” – The Guardian
How “The United Nations Of Graffiti” Flipped The Switch On A Counterculture Art Form
In the early days, by creed, a graffiti artist would ask neither for permission nor compensation. Now, after courting the former, artists at 5Pointz were receiving the latter. Graffiti was once a countercultural threat that conservative forces roundly maligned as a racially coded stand-in for urban delinquency. Now, graffiti had not only helped catalyze gentrification of one of the city’s fastest growing neighborhoods, but was also being handsomely rewarded for it, with legal recognition by a judge and jury. – The New Republic
Robert Therrien, Whimsical Sculptor, Dead At 71
“[He] was best known for his oversized sculptures of chairs and tables that he produced at larger-than-life, room-filling scale. In doing so, everyday pieces of furniture seem unreal, and viewers become like children, crawling beneath kitchen tables. They have become staples at museums across the world.” – ARTnews
San Francisco Ballet Recruits Two Stars
“Longtime Boston Ballet star Misa Kuranaga will be joining the company as a principal dancer for the 2019-20 season, while Dutch National Ballet principal Sasha Mukhamedov will join as a soloist. They join a slew of newly promoted SFB principals and soloists, announced earlier this year.” – Pointe Magazine
Backstage With The Very Butch Boys Of The Bolshoi Ballet
“In Russia, that most macho of societies, male ballet has never been a sniggering joke about guys in tights. There is no finer expression of manly patriotism than to dance, especially for the Bolshoi.” Reporter Janice Turner goes to the theatre to watch the company’s men rehearse (what else?) Spartacus. – The Times (UK)
If Your Theatre Company Wants To Produce More Plays By Women, Here’s Where To Find Some
For five years now, a collective called The Kilroys has been releasing an annual list of recommended new plays, as yet unproduced or “under-produced,” by female, transgender, and non-binary writers. “The list appears to be having an impact. The organization says that 100 plays it has named have been produced or promised productions, and one, Cost of Living by Martyna Majok, won a Pulitzer Prize.” – The New York Times
How Jaap Van Zweden Used Music To Get His Autistic Son To Speak
Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes talks to the conductor and his wife, Aaltje, about how their son Benjamin, now 29 and able to speak Dutch and English, was uncommunicative until they found a way to use songs to help him speak. The van Zwedens went on to start a foundation and a residential facility for seriously autistic young people. (includes video) – CBS
In Indie Films, At Least, Female Writers And Directors Are Making Progress (If Not Yet Parity)
“Women made up nearly a third of the directors, executive producers, writers, cinematographers and editors, and though they were still outnumbered by men two to one, the new figures represented a leap: A decade ago, women occupied just 24 percent of those positions.” – The New York Times
National Academy Of Design In New York Will Not Be Reopening Its Museum
“After years of financial crises, shifting leadership and painful internal debate about its future, the National Academy closed its museum, separated from its school and began selling off its Manhattan properties in 2016.” Says one of the organization’s co-chairs, “The National Academy became the thing that devoured itself. The museum and school were draining all the resources. There wasn’t any money for the programmes that would actually improve the academicians’ lives.” – The Art Newspaper
CEO Of London’s Serpentine Galleries Resigns Following Uproar Over Investment In Spyware Firm
“The chief executive of the Serpentine Galleries, Yana Peel, resigned on Tuesday after a newspaper investigation revealed she had connections to a cybersecurity firm whose technology has been used to target journalists and human rights activists.” – The New York Times
La Scala’s Next Superintendent Will Be Dominique Meyer Of Vienna State Opera: Reports
Italian media are reporting that the mayor of Milan, who is ex officio chair of La Scala’s board, said after a meeting that Meyer was the choice; for now, English-language outlets report that the mayor said only that a candidate whom he couldn’t name had been selected (but that all the speculation points to Meyer). The contract of the current superintendent, Alexander Pereira, expires in 2020 and (beyond a possible two-year extension) is not being renewed. – The Guardian
For First Time, Nonwhite Writer Wins UK’s Most Prestigious Children’s Book Prize
Elizabeth Acevedo, a Dominican-American who got her literary start at poetry slams, won the 2019 Carnegie Medal for her verse novel The Poet X. Jackie Morris won the Kate Greenaway Medal for illustration for The Lost Words, about words that were removed from the Oxford Junior Dictionary because they supposedly aren’t used enough by children. – The Guardian
The Poetry Slam Comes To Dubai
Two Dubai-resident Sudanese who met at a poetry event in Abu Dhabi (because there was no such thing in Dubai) have joined forces to open Blank Space, where they’ve basically created a spoken-poetry scene in the city. – Gulf News