"Tuxedo vendors say that awards season drives huge sales on top of their usual income from weddings and proms, on the order of 20% to 30% of their annual revenue." But, from last-minute requests to late returns, it's not easy. - Los Angeles Times
How to watch the Oscars red carpet (this year, the red will be more beige) and the show itself, and here are also a few predictions for who, and what, will win. - The New York Times
Valparaiso, a Lutheran university in northwestern Indiana that is struggling with the declining enrollment seen at many schools, is planning to sell several works from the collection of its Brauer Museum of Art to raise $10 million for the renovation of two freshman dormitories, which it sees as key to securing its future. - The New York Times
The anxiety about what kids are reading inevitably bleeds into fear about what else they’re doing—the trope of the sexy librarian, ever about to loosen her hair and initiate you into forbidden knowledge, exists for a reason. But books are obscene in another way. - The New Yorker
Algorithms are not neutral: they train us as much as we train them. Using them to promote local music or Canadian music may inspire a wider variety of music heard on streaming services. - The Conversation
To combat the councils decisions, four MSPs wrote to the Scottish government, asking them to intervene and save the music programmes. Over the weekend, the government confirmed it would cover the extra funding needed to keep Big Noise projects running in each area. - ClassicFM
Social media plays a large role in the news habits of all Millennials and Gen Z, as shown in our first report on these generations. For example, 74% of Gen Z get news daily from social media. - American Press Institute
“If you take the top 10,000 YouTube videos by performance and dub them in 20-plus languages, you could easily unlock an additional half a trillion to a trillion views,” he told Rest of World. - Rest of World
Roughly a French Louisiana equivalent of Gullah, the African-English hybrid of the South Carolina and Georgia Sea Islands, Kouri-Vini developed among the region's Black and mixed-race Creoles in the early 1700s. It faded away during the 20th century, but some present-day Creoles are working to bring it back to life. - BBC
"Independent films, movies aimed at adults, or those created in different art styles rarely get nominated, let alone win. The 17 animators interviewed for this story disagree on the award's success in championing animation, question its history of nominees and winners, and wonder whether its issues are ultimately fixable." - Vulture
For how long has science occurred outside the West? Is it fundamentally a Western export, a product of distinctly Western attitudes and values? - Boston Review
"This year's cohort spanned five artists at different career stages ... whose movement styles encompass contemporary dance, classical ballet, tango and hip-hop. ... (The five got) studio time, a cast of two or three from ABT's corps and apprentice ranks, choreographic coaching — and complete artistic freedom to create a 5-to-10-minute work." - Dance Magazine
We think of these buildings as expressions of faith, but they were more than that. They were ways of conceptualising faith in stone and glass — what the scholastic philosopher Peter Abelard called “geometrised theology”. - The Critic
"Critics called his storylines ludicrous and his special effects schlocky, … but many of his films turned a profit and gained a cult following, attracting later generations of moviegoers … (with) mutant ants, 60-foot giants, rampaging grasshoppers and a bloodthirsty spider that proves too big to squash." - MSN (The Washington Post)
The world that Balanchine created for himself—one that moved from woman to woman, muse to muse—was itself a form of ronde. Come June 23, 1977, when the choreographer was seventy-three years old, he premiered a ballet that could have taken that line from Ophüls. “We’re in Vienna. It’s 1900.” - New Criterion
