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Chains Dominate Retail, But Indie Bookstore Numbers Are Way Up

“About 422 new indie bookshops opened in 2025, according to the American Booksellers Association, a 31% rise from 2024.” What the heck? - The Guardian (UK)

Every Town, Including Every Refugee Camp, Needs A Theatre

“As migrants faced uncertainty, displacement and made frequent attempts to cross into the United Kingdom, a robust arts community began to take shape inside the Good Chance Theatre. Residents staged stand-up comedy, music, storytelling, kung fu, circus acts and theater performances.” - Sahan Journal

The Film About France During WWII That Is Very, Alarmingly Relevant To Several Other Countries Right Now

Yes, you need to watch The Sorrow and the Pity, and you need to do it right now. Why? Because “Ophuls’s film is illuminating precisely because its lessons about complicity apply to evil and corruption of all kinds.” - The Atlantic

South Korea Wants To Export Its Version Of Broadway. Can A.I. Glasses Make It Doable?

The country’s live theater is vibrant (Exhibit A: Maybe Happy Ending); producers and local authorities want it to catch on abroad the way K-pop and TV drama have, and language is the biggest barrier. Now they’ve developed AI-powered glasses which listen for cue words and match subtitles to dialogue. - The New York Times

How Streaming Platforms Reignited The YA Boom

“‘It has to resonate and feel authentic to the time,’ says one expert. ‘This generation really sees stereotypes pretty quickly … they’ll see inappropriate behavior quickly, and they will call it out.’” - Los Angeles Times (MSN)

In A Music Rut? Try This Wild Idea

“Each time I tune in—which is every day now—it feels as if someone cooler than me is handing me a mixtape made with care, exactly how finding new music should feel. I’m pleasantly surprised by what I’m listening to instead of frustrated and bored.” - Slate

In The Bay Area, Earlier Curtain Times Are Catching On

From ACT in San Francisco to Berkeley Rep to Stanford Live, producers and presenters are moving starting times from 8:00 to 7:30, 7:00 or even 6:30. So far, there have been lots of favorable comments and very few complaints. - San Francisco Chronicle (Yahoo!)

Making Technology So Easy To Use Was Clearly A Huge Design Error

“What started as a technique to support human understanding in the face of increasingly complex tools became a way to replace human understanding. Ease became an unquestioned good. Complexity became something to hide.” - Slate

The World’s 100 Most Visited Museums In 2025: Some Surprises Among The Perennials

The Louvre is still no. 1, with the Vatican Museums a distant second; the National Museum in Seoul surpassed the British Museum to take third place. Attendance at some legacy institutions still hasn’t recovered from COVID, but some new museums are popular, and numbers keep growing in Asia and Latin America. - The Art Newspaper

South Africa’s Daring Anti-Apartheid Theatre Turns Fifty

“Even the fact that audiences were made up of Black and white South Africans mingling together was unheard of in a city where the law separated areas and people by race.” - NPR

City Ballet Won’t Perform At The Kennedy Center

Add it to the long, long list of cancellations. - The New York Times

New American Operas Do Not Have To “Challenge” Audiences: John McWhorter

“One thing that could help turn things around is if opera companies offered audiences works in the language they speak (and) a musical language they can readily recognize and enjoy. … Too often composers and producers reject music that audiences can easily appreciate as insufficiently sophisticated or original.” - The New York Times

This World-Famous Concert Hall Lets Students In To Study While Musicians Play For Them

“The study sessions were first organized during the COVID-19 pandemic by Entree, the youth association of (Amsterdam’s) Concertgebouw, to help students improve their concentration and introduce them to the charms of classical music. They have been a hit ever since.” - AP

A New Way To Consume What’s Euphemistically Known As ‘Kissing’ Books

"Quinn finds the guys (mostly guys) in television shows whose characters people fantasize about. It pays those guys to read original scripts that have explicit sex in them—often, as with Ember & Ice, stories that vaguely echo the original source material that the actor became famous for.” - Slate

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