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- The Lakota Music Project vs. “Rootlessness” Today
- Have We Given Liberal Arts Institutions Too Much Credit?
While liberal arts institutions do have intrinsic value, that doesn’t mean they are entitled to be socially favoured or economically exceptional for ever. A particularly stubborn myth is that liberal arts education has a monopoly on cultivating critical thinking. – The Guardian
- Tom Stoppard, Man of Ideas
A man of consummate urbanity who lived like a country squire, he was a sportsman (cricket was his game) and a connoisseur of ideas, which he treated with a cricketer’s agility and vigor. – Los Angeles Times
- Why Perfectionism Is Killing Our Culture
This fetishization of perfection might not be surprising, but that doesn’t make it any less damaging. You cannot learn or grow while trying to appear as if you have everything figured out. You cannot talk to God by trying to avoid doing something wrong. Perfection is stagnation. – The New York Times
- Museums Struggle To Reinvent In A Shifting Landscape
As public funding evaporates, political scrutiny intensifies, and donor behavior shifts, museums are confronting a turning point: adapt or risk irrelevance. The museums best poised for the future are those willing to embrace collaboration, transparency, and experimentation. – Artnet
- Carrie Soloway, The Real-Life Person Who Inspired Prime’s ‘Transparent,’ Has Died At 88
“Dr. Soloway went to red carpet events related to the show,” but she didn’t love them. “She was very humble in terms of publicity; she wasn’t interested in it. … She loved the show and us and the character, but sometimes she wasn’t in the mood to be everyone’s favorite trailblazer.” – Chicago Sun-Times
- How The Classical Guitar Becomes One Of The Most Complex Instruments, In A Good Musician’s Hands
“What’s distinctive about the classical guitar is its simplicity. Ultimately, it’s basically a wooden box with strings attached and a fretted neck, a bridge, a saddle, and tuning pegs. Classical guitar has no inbuilt amplification, and the sounds are produced very directly.” – Aeon
- What Will This French City Do If Its Famous Comic Book Festival Fails?
Angoulême is where graphic novels and comic books are normally celebrated in a huge festival each year. But maybe not in 2026. “Criticized for financial opacity, harsh management style and the firing of an employee who had filed a rape complaint, the company 9e Art + has found itself cornered on all sides.” – Le Monde English (Archive Today)
- Fighting To Save Britain’s First Multiplex Movie Theatre From A Housing Development
“As a shot of commercial and architectural adrenaline, it revived British cinema-going, welcoming more than a million visitors in its first year, and impelling the subsequent proliferation of multiplexes.” – The Guardian (UK)
- How Did Tom Stoppard Fund His Playwriting?
Hollywood. “At one point in the early 1990s, Stoppard earned $500,000 for a five-week stretch polishing various projects for Universal Pictures. … He seemed to have a particular fondness for dog movies, contributing to both Beethoven and 102 Dalmatians.” – The New York Times
- Ethan Hawke On Playing The 5-Foot-Tall, Combover-Laden Lorenz Hart
“Hawke shaved his head and stood in a trench to appear shorter than his co-stars. This literally gave him a fresh view on the world.” – The Guardian (UK)
- Clueless Colleges Are Preparing To Harm Their Students In The Name Of ‘Preparing’ Them For A World Of AI
“Based on the available evidence, the skills that future graduates will most need in the AI era—creative thinking, the capacity to learn new things, flexible modes of analysis—are precisely those that are likely to be eroded by inserting AI into the educational process.” – The Atlantic
- Video Games Are Feeding A Deep Well Of Conspiracy Theories
“In the fiction of Assassin’s Creed, humanity is descended from ancient aliens; … world events [are] influenced by a shadow war between two secret societies; the media exists to manipulate the public. This makes for an exciting series of video games” — but it echoes real-life conspiracy theories. – Slate
- Daniel Woodrell, The Author Of Winter’s Bone, Has Died At 72
Woodrell was “a novelist known for prose as rugged and elemental as the igneous rock of the Ozark Mountains, his birthplace, which he returned to just as his artistic craftsmanship peaked.” – The New York Times
- The Oxford Word Of The Year Is Probably Something You Experience Every Day
You know what clickbait is, right? Well, the word of the year is its anger-fueled cousin, rage bait, “manipulative tactics used to drive engagement online, with usage of it increasing threefold in the last 12 months.” – BBC
- There’s A Lot Of History, And Art, Beyond Art Basel Miami Beach
Getting beyond the tent walls means understanding just how much the Cuban diaspora means to the city. – The New York Times
- Why Is A 1998 Musical Resonating With Audiences Now?
“We wrote something, you know, with very open hearts and no political agenda. We just wanted to tell this amazing story, and look what has happened.” – NPR
- A Classical Pianist’s Plea To Let Art Be Messy, And Real
“Playing an instrument well is phenomenally difficult. It takes a lifetime of arduous work and can become all-consuming, making it easy to forget that technical mastery is a means to an expressive end, not the goal. … In and of itself, it is uninteresting.” – The New York Times
- In The Miserable Economy For Creative People, What Happens When One Is Successful?
In Alison Bechdel’s newest book, “Communal systems of support and shared resources are positioned against the capitalist drive to isolate, hoard resources, and privatize.” – Los Angeles Review of Books
- Inside The Philly Traveling Museum Where Black Collectors Have The Spotlight
“It got to the point where I had more art than walls. … I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool for a bunch of collectors to get together and create a space to show our work. Tell our story?’” – Philadelphia Inquirer (MSN)
- The Super Weird, Remixed Way People Are Watching Old TV Shows
“People are sitting through one-to-two minute, out-of-order clips of TV shows and movies on social media, awkwardly cropped for the vertical format and often with terrible music blaring in the background.” Okaaaaaay. But the people who love them really love them. – Washington Post (MSN)
- Nashville Would Like To Bring Back A Pretty Cool Piece Of Red Grooms Visual Heritage, But The Money Isn’t There
“Grooms’s carousel illustrates the financial challenge of regional museums, which scrounge to raise funds and then have to decide whether to add a wing or spend the money on upkeep for their collections.” – The New York Times
- Major Studios Turned Down ‘Stranger Things’
And it’s become, essentially, Netflix’s Star Wars, “that anchor series that drives customer acquisition and helps define the original programming.” – Los Angeles Times (Yahoo)
- Tom Stoppard’s Language Blazed With Urgency
“He loved his words to the point of mania and yet fretted over their inadequacy, making the mere act of speech seem somehow both heroic and doomed. He caused words to explode like fireworks, dazzling us with their bright, multicolored patterns.” – The New York Times
- With A Phone, A Friend, And Some LEGO, You’re All Set To Understand The Planet
Sure, people didn’t have phones (or LEGO) 2,000 years ago, but even they knew the Earth was round. – Wired
- Whose ‘Time’ Is It, In Oscars Terms?
And what does that mean, anyway? Can an actor, or director, win on vibes alone? – Vulture
- How Did These Film Studios Get Approved In A British Greenbelt?
One person on the town council: “This is the direct result of ill-thought-out planning changes and poor decision making, which threaten to destroy our green spaces.” But hey, James Cameron supports it. – BBC
- Actor Jason Schwartzman Loves The Library
“Everyone else is so calm, and everyone’s working or researching or something. It’s almost like a movie set, and I have to pretend I’m working, too. Everyone should have a library card. It’s like a bicycle but for your brain.” – The New York Times
- Stoppard Never Got the Nobel Prize for Literature<a href="https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/2025/11/stoppard-never-got-the-nobel-prize-for-literature.html" title="Stoppard Never Got the Nobel Prize for Literature“
- In Turbulent Times, An ‘Uneasy Book’ Might Be The Perfect Thing
Tessa Hadley: “Storytelling was the most powerful magic I knew: it got expressed first in the games I played out with my friends. Written down though, words were puny for such a long time.” Then came Henry James. – The Guardian (UK)
- Do You Miss Angelfire And Geocites?
Then the indie web might be for you. It’s “pushing back against algorithms and AI and calling for a more creative, personal internet.” – The Verge (Archive Today)
- The Weird Instrument, Invented By Accident, That Sometimes Gets Its Players Exorcised
Well, if not exorcised, at least accosted by crosses: “Thereminists appear to carve sound out of thin air, using their hands to prompt a distinct whir from its wooden, lectern-like body by manipulating the electromagnetic fields around its two antennae.” – The New York Times
- Look, Says The Guardian, Both Turner And Constable Were ‘Radical’ In British, And International, Art
“Constable’s paintings might not have the exciting steam trains, boats and burning Houses of Parliament of Turner’s, but they were radical too. Painting mill workers and bargemen was groundbreaking at a time when grandiose classical themes – favoured by Turner – were de rigueur.” – The Guardian (UK)
- This Seattle Graphic Novel Store Focuses On The Art Of Comics
Larry Reid, the man who owns and runs Seattle’s Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery, says that comics have “a more immediate impact on culture than fine art.” – Seattle Times
- Sally Rooney Says She May No Longer Be Able To Sell Her Books In The UK
Rooney says that “UK legislation may mean she cannot be paid royalties by her British publisher or the BBC because it could leave both at risk of being accused of funding terrorism.” The Irish writer has said that she intends her royalties to support the group Palestine Action. – BBC
