AJ Four Ways:
Text Only (by date) | headlines only
- How Defunding Arts Education Brought About Civic Unraveling
The Bicentennial offered everyday people in the middle of the map novel opportunities to appreciate and deliberate what America was, and it succeeded in this because it conducted more than a history lesson: Art was surprisingly paramount in this event of collective self-identification, historical commemoration, and political convocation. – ARTnews
- A Ballet Where The Onstage Pianist Calls The Shots
In 2012, superstar pianist Lang Lang contacted choreographer Stanton Welch hoping to collaborate. The result was Sons de l’âme, an evening-length ballet in which the onstage pianist plays Chopin while the dancers execute their steps in time with whatever tempos the pianist chooses. Here Welch talks about how the piece has developed. – Gramilano
- For Lifelong Learning, It’s Better With Partners
The internet is full of resources for self-directed learning: for any subject, you can easily find blog posts about essential texts, links to university syllabi, and hours of YouTube lectures. When I attempted to make use of these guides, however, I often found myself disengaged and unfocused. – Psyche
- How Venice Built The World’s First Ghetto
In 1516, the Venetian Senate voted to create the world’s first ‘ghetto’. All Jews then living in the city – as well as any others who might come later – were ordered to move immediately to a small island in the northeastern sestiere of Cannaregio. It was anything but appealing. – Aeon
- What’s Special About Anne Carson’s Work
At a time when scholarship and creative writing are often treated as separate pursuits, Carson has shown how deeply they belong together. Her work is a reminder that thought and imagination don’t compete with one another, but continually enrich each other. – The Conversation
- Theaster Gates Has Bought An Old-School Porcelain Factory
Pickard China in Antioch, Illinois is the last remaining manufacturer of high-end porcelain in the US — and with a shrinking market, aging and deteriorating equipment, and the retirement of the last Pickard family owner, the factory’s future seemed grim. Then Gates decided to make Pickard China part of his artistic practice. – NPR
- How Data Visualization Tells Stories
Because data, and how we present it, tells a story, it’s important to transform results responsibly into visuals. A good visualization can show you really interesting patterns in your data; however, a bad visualization, like truncating the Y-axis or choosing the wrong type of plot, can lead you or your audience to the wrong conclusions. – The Scientist
- Why Annie Dillard Deserved A Nobel
She deserved the prize, first of all, as the major practitioner of literary nonfiction. The committee has historically overlooked this genre. – 3 Quarks Daily
- The Growing Popularity Of Audiobook Walking Clubs
Audiobook walking clubs are now emerging around the country, turning an activity typically enjoyed solo into a low-pressure social event. For about an hour, everyone listens to a book of their choosing as they walk, then gathers afterward to compare notes, trade recommendations, and—in many cases—make plans to see each other again. – Time
- Maybe “The Jazz Singer” Wasn’t The First Talkie After All
“The 46-minute feature film (Till the Bells Ring), featuring spoken parts and synchronised sound throughout, premiered in Edinburgh in October 1926, a year before The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson, hit New York’s screens to widespread fanfare and took its place in the history books.” – The Guardian
- Despite Being Shut Down, Voice Of America Still Costs $1.6 Million Per Week
“It’s been more than a year since the Trump administration dismantled Voice of America, the largest U.S. international broadcaster, saying ‘taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda.’ Yet the agency is costing the government millions even as it stopped operations.” – Fortune
- UK Conservatives Plan To Cut £1 Billion From Culture Budget If Elected
“Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has revealed that her party plans to cut budgets extensively if it wins the next election, including slashing £1bn from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.” – The Stage (UK)
- Leon Botstein Resigns All His Remaining Positions At Bard College
The move came less than a day after a particularly damning email message from Botstein to Jeffrey Epstein became public and a Congressman called for an investigation. Botstein had been president of the college for 51 years until last May and was still a professor and a mainstay of Bard’s music programs. – The Guardian
- Trump Administration Says Kennedy Center Is Too Dangerous For Public But Safe Enough For National Symphony To Rehearse There
“So far, none of the musicians have encountered collapsing concrete garage decks, falling 2,500-pound roof sections or ‘electrical explosions’ — risks the center’s management says lurk everywhere.” – The New York Times
- Anne Carson Wins 2026 Nobel Prize For Literature
The Canadian poet, essayist, and translator of ancient Greek drama was cited “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.” – AP
- Gramophone’s Record Of The Year Is A 10-Disc Set Of 17th-Century Chamber Music
An Erato release, headed up by harpsichordist Jean Rondeau, of the complete works of Louis Couperin has won the top prize at the 2026 Gramophone Awards. Among other honorees were Imogen Cooper (Lifetime Achievement), the Bamberg Symphony (Orchestra of the Year), and violinist Isabelle Faust (Artist of the Year). – Gramophone
- Reading James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages
A year ago James Marriott had a Substack post on “the dawn of the post-literate society” that as I write has over 21,000 likes and 6,000 restacks: clearly something that struck a chord. And now we have a book length treatment of the issue, though a short book – put your phone away and you can read it in an afternoon.
As someone who recently retired from over forty years of university teaching, my own sense is that there has been a genuine decline in the ability of college students (and I only ever taught at non-elite public universities) to read relatively sophisticated, but non-specialist, essays and books – i.e. undergraduate-appropriate – and Marriott introduces the book with similar observations from his friends who teach in England. So I had to approach The New Dark Ages avoiding the trap of simply seeing the evidence that confirms my casual empiricism, and then clicking on the heart icon.
“New dark ages”, or, per the subtitle, “death of reading” and “post-literate society”: these are strong words. Is it all that bad? Even a documented recent decline in various degrees of literacy does not necessarily mean a trend headed towards rock bottom. Or does it?
Marriott, I think wisely, does not try to look too far into the future; there are enough worries in the here and now (I’m grateful for the break from vague speculation regarding the long-term impact of artificial intelligence, which is deeply in the range of diminishing returns right now). The book begins with the importance of the invention of reading and writing to the development of civilizations, then to the impact of the printing press, the ability to disseminate writings widely, and increasing literacy, all of which led to the great centuries, call them 1750 – 1950, of a culture of reading. It shaped science and the humanities, created the novel, and served as fuel for democratic political reform. Reading shaped how we think – with the written word we can process complex ideas that are beyond the capabilities of even the finest oral cultures. And reading encourages skepticism and critique, leading to the diminishment of superstition and unfounded claims. Even oral culture changes as we become used to more sophisticated writing (I’m currently reading Cheryl Misak’s wonderful biography of Frank Ramsey, and the culture of philosophical discussion at Cambridge in the 1920s (oh for time travel!) was only possible from their deep, sentence-by-sentence, parsing of each other’s written works). But it was not just all at this elevated level – reading was popular for middle-class folk, it was how to pass the time commuting or after work, and had been made very affordable (Marriott does not mention the establishment of Penguin Books in the 1930s, though I think this was also an important moment).
What went wrong?
The beginning of the end was television. Smartphones are the obvious suspect in the decline of reading today, but Marriott says it was the introduction into our homes of a screen a family could passively watch that was the big change, with the smartphone in this century serving as the super-accelerant to something that had already begun. Reading takes more effort than watching a television screen or scrolling on a phone, it requires concentration, being free of distraction. Thus began the decline.
Now on average we read less, and, as noted above, on average people find it more of a challenge – college syllabi are shortened in the number of readings as well as their length and complexity, and ordinary tastes in literature decline. The New York Times Book Review has never been what you could call highbrow, but it now offers sections to cheerfully “Let us help you find your next book: romance” (they can also help you with fantasy). And this is for that segment of the population with at least the reading interest to browse the Times.
Marriott turns his focus at the end of the book to what the decline in literary culture has done to our politics. Contemporary politicians are not serious readers. They have adapted, self-selected, into our screen culture, focusing on what image they project in a fifteen-second video clip for CNN or Fox News, and spending more time on their social media posts than on speeches. Although Trump is the ne plus ultra of the end of literacy in politics, Marriott reminds us that this decline is across all political parties and persuasions. With a non-reading public, our politics takes place through sound-bites and slogans. We get an increase in the production of, and the belief in, nonsense claims – “vaccines cause autism”, “Our military needs more testosterone”, “the 2020 presidential election was stolen”, “tariffs will make us rich” – because bullshit claims are easy to make but require at least some analysis, reference to studies, and logic, to refute; the great long decline in superstitions that began two-and-a-half centuries ago begins to reverse. Talk is cheap for the demagogue but costly for the critic. In a shift that began in the 1960s, but well-entrenched now, voters tend to choose a political affiliation first, based on an intuition of who is their tribe, and then adopt the complete slate of official positions of that tribe, rather than independently thinking about issues and then voting for the party that, all things considered, offers a package on salient issues closest to their own. This reflects the decline in serious reading on current affairs, and also feeds it, in a vicious loop – politicians now just shout slogans at their followers, and toss insults at the opposition, as the crowd cheers and boos.
Marriott is a genial writer and avoids coming off as a scold (probably better than I do). He is careful to say that being well-read does not make for a more ethical individual, nor does being a non-reader make one less kind or generous. And this applies to whole societies as well: the twentieth century destroyed any hope that high culture protects a society from descent into barbarism and murder.
I’ll touch on two aspects of the decline of reading that Marriott does not pursue at length (this is not a criticism – I think it was a good choice to keep The New Dark Ages at 167 short pages of text).
One is that the decline in literacy in the young is not evenly distributed. And those who come out of high school simply unable to manage any complexity in text are going to have a rough go of it. Detailed documents from corporations outlining the terms of service, or from government agencies in the attempt to apply for benefits to which they are legally entitled, become a terrible struggle, typically ending in simply giving up. Jobs involving ordinary office or machine work that require the ability to quickly and accurately understand documents are out of reach. A world in which every fifteen-year old is a good reader will be a more equal world, a fairer one.
A second issue is at the other end of the scale. Any genre of art, if it is to flourish, needs a critical mass of audience who are active consumers of it, who through experience have developed the taste to be able to tell the valuable from the meretricious. Lose that critical mass, and the art goes into decline, whether it be film, music, theatre, dance, painting, or writing. We can do all we can to try to nurture and support talented young artists, but if the audience isn’t there, it will not bear fruit. An end to the culture of reading will cause a decline in the high art of literature as well.
There are people who could try to dismiss Marriott’s concerns with “well, there have always been culture pessimists telling us the sky is falling, haven’t there?”. Well, yes, there have been, but it doesn’t mean they were wrong, that something in our culture is not going terribly awry.
This is an important book and I recommend it.
Coda: Henry Oliver gives a thoughtful review of the book here, and interviews James Marriott here – these are both worth your time.
Cross-posted at https://michaelrushton.substack.com/
- Thieves Carted Off a 330-Pound Dalí
Good Morning,
Thieves took the 330-pound bronze cover of Dalí’s Livre de l’Apocalypse, inlaid with precious stones and seashells, from a museum in Issoire, France, overnight Sunday, and police can’t say how they moved it unnoticed. Its owner, the restorer Christian Karoutzos, told local radio, “They assassinated France” (The Telegraph).
The Justice Department is citing executive privilege to withhold records from Rep. Joyce Beatty’s suit over the Kennedy Center’s planned two-year closure (Forbes). Beatty, a center board member, says the “one-year review” Trump cited never happened; what the center turned over were four reports from 2021 to 2024, none contemplating a full closure.
Leon Botstein left the Bard College presidency after 51 years, following a WilmerHale review that counted 25 visits to Jeffrey Epstein’s townhouse; he is on sabbatical writing a book on Mahler and still runs the Bard Music Festival and The Orchestra Now (The New York Times). Elaina Richardson, leaving Yaddo, the Saratoga Springs artist retreat, after 26 years, grew its endowment from $8 million to about $40 million (Hyperallergic).
London’s V&A will open a voluntary exit scheme with no savings target or terms published, though its latest accounts show staff costs up 13 percent to £57.5 million (Art in Context). James and Kathryn Murdoch paid more than $300 million for New York magazine and Vox; James says human authorship gets more valuable as AI rises (Vanity Fair).
All of our stories below.
- Behind The Scenes: How They Choose The Winner Of The Nobel Prize For Literature
The Swedish Academy does not discuss the criteria it uses for selecting Nobel laureates, but here are the basics of how the process works. – Deutsche Welle
- What MacKenzie Scott Bezos’ Serialized Book Says About How Amazon Has Changed Publishing
The former wife of a man who built a notorious empire by making other people’s books ever easier to buy and, eventually, ever easier to produce has herself produced a novel that seems to have stepped directly into the literary territory that Amazon helped make so fertile. – The New Yorker
- Marin Alsop Takes Another Conducting Job
She is now artistic director of the Webern Kammerphilharmonie, the training orchestra of Vienna’s University of Music and Performing Arts. Currently, she is also artistic director of the Polish National Radio Symphony, chief conductor of the Chicago Symphony at Ravinia, and principal guest conductor of The Philadelphia Orchestra and London’s Philharmonia Orchestra. – Gramophone
- Finalists For This Year’s National Book Awards
The winners in each of the five categories—fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translated literature, and young people’s literature—will be announced at an awards ceremony on November 18. – Publishers Weekly
- A Way To Create Less Bland New Architecture?
As part of the £1.5 million research partnership, Humanise said it wants to “challenge the ‘blandemic’ of dull, soulless development” and improve the way the UK designs and builds its urban environments. – Dezeen
- London’s Royal Ballet School At 100
“In the 1980s Margot Fonteyn told me her technique as Britain’s most celebrated ballerina was far inferior to that of any young dancer starting out in the Eighties. ‘And today the technical accomplishment is far greater than it was 40 years ago,’ (Royal Ballet School artistic director Iain) Mackay tells me.” – The Times (UK)
- Leon Botstein Is No Longer President Of Bard College. But…
Botstein, embattled and polarizing, has held on. He has continued to teach at Bard, the liberal arts college 100 miles north of New York City. (He is on sabbatical now to complete a book on Mahler.) He remains the artistic co-director of the Bard Music Festival and runs The Orchestra Now. – The New York Times
- 100 Years Of A Storied Artist Retreat
After 26 years at the helm of Yaddo, the storied artist retreat currently celebrating its 100th anniversary, Elaina Richardson is moving on. She will be succeeded by Cyra Levenson, deputy director of Learning and Engagement at the Guggenheim Museum, as announced last week. – Hyperallergic
- Measuring The Dance World
DDP’s latest data set shows half of the creative teams commissioned for new dance works are entirely male. Less than 10 percent have an equal proportion of men and women. All-women teams are rare. “It basically proves what people have known for a long time,” says DDP founder Elizabeth “Liza” Yntema. – Dance Magazine
- San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater Names New Artistic Director
“Elizabeth Williamson, … 47, currently serves as artistic director of Geva Theatre in Rochester, N.Y., and previously held leadership positions at Hartford Stage in Connecticut and Pioneer Theatre Company in Utah.” – San Francisco Chronicle (MSN)
- Disney Goes To Court To Contest Early License Review For ABC
Disney lawyers asked a judge in U.S. District Court in Washington to bar the F.C.C. from undertaking an unusual, early review of the broadcast licenses of the eight stations the company owns and operates. – The New York Times
- The New Version Of Destroying Reputations In Hollywood
While the lawsuits differ, they all claim the smear campaigns were carried out through anonymous websites, fabricated social media posts or promotion of unflattering articles and posts on the internet. – The New York Times
- What Are Donors Getting For Investing In KCRW?
You paid for the building with your bonds. You paid for the programming with your pledge drives. You paid the $447,529 salary with your donations. What you got: a 2.0 share, phantom metrics, and eleven million in programming money nobody can itemize. – Gregg Lewis
- Why James And Kathryn Murdoch Wanted To Buy New York Magazine And Vox
“The New York magazine business is a really unique model in that world,” James said. “They didn’t go down the road of just search engine optimization and serving all that sort of stuff that we’ve seen other magazines do. They’ve really doubled down on the commitment to this thoughtful long-form journalism.” – Vanity Fair
- What’s Really Going On With The Microdrama Boom?
“People used to compare the experience of watching prestige TV shows like The Sopranos to reading a great Victorian novel. By the same token, we can say that watching a microdrama is like being electrocuted onstage at the circus.” But what’s it like for the people making these things? – The New York Times Magazine
- “Executive Privilege”: Trump Administration Refuses To Turn Over Records In Kennedy Center Court Case
A motion from Congresswoman Joyce Beatty (D-OH), a member of the Center’s board who’s suing to prevent its closure, is requesting financial and other records as part of discovery. As Trump is chairman of the Kennedy Center board, the Justice Department argues that these records are protected by executive privilege. – Forbes
- Thieves Cart Off 330-Pound Book Cover By Salvador Dalí
The large bronze plate, inlaid with precious stones and seashells, was taken from the Centre d’art contemporain in Issoire in south-central France. The piece is the cover of the Livre de l’Apocalypse, a joint project of 14 painters and writers including Dalí, Cocteau, and Cioran, calligraphed and illuminated on parchment. – The Telegraph (UK) (Yahoo!)
