"When I watch the shows each year, I feel like I'm at a church pageant for a religion I don't belong to. It's as if it's not supposed to be good theater; it's supposed to be moral instruction that even a child could understand." - MSN (San Francisco Chronicle)
"For decades after The Joy Luck Club, the handful of movies with Asian-American casts mostly offered family-centric stories filled with generational hardship, sacrifice and culture clash. But now … audiences are finally getting to see all dimensions of the Asian-American experience — even the weird, bad and raunchy parts." - The New York Times
"The crisis is a perfect storm of bad economic and demographic trends, exacerbated by a change in cultural habits during the pandemic. … The confluence has theater business professionals issuing dire warnings. 'By this time next year, I think the industry will shrink by half,'" said one consultant. - MSN (The Washington Post)
"By the spring of 2023, the promise of the Cultural Plan" — equity — "had gotten shoved to the side, as the so-called 'Big 7' ... struggled just to keep the doors open." Now the pandemic seems to be past, but audiences have been slow to return, and the city is recalibrating. - KERA (Dallas)
"Nancy Yao, who had been criticized for her handling of sexual harassment allegations at a New York museum, has withdrawn from a prestige post as the Smithsonian's founding director of a new women's history museum … 'due to family issues that require her attention.'" - MSN (The Washington Post)
"Threads is billed as a text-based version of Meta's photo-sharing app Instagram that the company says provides 'a new, separate space for real-time updates and public conversations.' It went live late Wednesday in Apple and Google Android app stores." - AP
"The Wiener Zeitung, which is owned by the Austrian government but editorially independent, suffered a sharp decrease in revenue after a recent law dropped a requirement for companies to pay to publish changes to the commercial registry in the print edition." (It will continue publishing online.) - AP
"What we see is children who learn how to play the drums aren't afraid of making mistakes. When they stop and make a mistake in their drumming they simply pause, reset, and off they go, and it's no big deal." - BBC
“Here’s the super easy, headline statement: AI, or music that contains AI-created elements is absolutely eligible for entry and for consideration for Grammy nomination. Period,” Mason told The Associated Press. - Toronto Star (AP)
Grant recipients, including visual artists, musicians, filmmakers, writers, actors and dancers, were chosen at random from a pool of more than 8,000 eligible applicants, the government said in a news release; 13 circus artists and 10 architects were also selected for the income grants. - NBC
The two-armed robot, designed by the Korea Institute of Industrial Technology, made its debut at the National Theater of Korea, leading musicians in the country’s national orchestra. - CNN
The identification of the present, not as a hectic shimmer of zeptoseconds but a series of temporal clearings where one might deeply linger, originates in the Buddhist concept of “sati”, understood as “moment to moment awareness of present events”. - The Guardian
It will help preserve the site for future archaeologists who might have more modern methods and can study the evidence better or ask new questions. - The Conversation
About two million people call Mecca home, and while there are concessions to the city's sacredness — no movie theaters, no loud music at celebrations, and the malls are small by Gulf standards — Meccans live much like other Saudis. - AP
When did the so-called narrative turn—the doctrine of narrative supremacy—go mainstream? “At a certain point in history, people started saying, ‘We are born storytellers,’ ” the novelist Amit Chaudhuri said at a 2018 symposium he convened called “Against Storytelling.” - The New Yorker
