What is the purpose of studying at a university beyond job training? How can schools like Valparaiso, which emphasize learning outside of vocational courses, survive when a corporate-consumer model has overtaken higher education and exerted a powerful influence on administrators and students alike? - The New Republic
Lynn Seymour’s death last Wednesday undammed an outpouring of truly wrenching sadness from those whom this extraordinary ballerina injected with her poison - as the choreographer Frederick Ashton memorably said about his enslavement to Anna Pavlova. - The Arts Desk
Much of the reluctance to do what climate change requires comes from the assumption that it means trading abundance for austerity. But what if it meant giving up things we’re well rid of, from deadly emissions to nagging feelings of doom and complicity in destruction? - Washington Post
The goal is to spur more inclusive hiring in the film business, but some producers who are trying to comply say the process is cumbersome at best and privacy invading at worst. - The Hollywood Reporter
"Danmei is romantic fiction about men or male beings – ghosts, foxes, even a mushroom – falling in love, written almost exclusively by and for straight women." Most danmei authors use pseudonyms – for example, Mo Xiang Tong Xiu ("fragrance of ink, odour of money") – because of the Communist Party's disapproval. - The Guardian
In the end, Grand Central Madison succeeds brilliantly in its mission of handling the flow of crowds. But this is merely directing traffic, and we have the right to demand more from our public buildings. To be treated with dignity, for example. - Wall Street Journal
"Seed and garden catalogues sell a magical, boozy, Jack-and-the-beanstalk promise: the coming of spring, the rapture of bloom, the fleshy, wet, watermelon-and-lemon tang of summer. ... They make strangely compelling reading, like a village mystery or the back of a cereal box." - The New Yorker
The advancement of generative artificial intelligence is not an advancement toward artificial personhood for a simple, absolute reason: There is no falsifiable thesis of consciousness. You cannot find a researcher who can define, in a testable way, what consciousness is. - The Atlantic
"The dance video, in which the blue balloons stood in for ions, depicted how Checkers Marshall's Ph.D. work aims to make metal-organic frameworks smaller, more effective, and more useful for other applications, from water filtration to nerve agent detoxification." - Science
As I puttered around the conference, I thought about the fact that although books don’t have feelings, the librarians forced to remove them from the shelves definitely do. America’s librarians are under enormous pressure, and they need to blow off some steam. - The Atlantic
For nearly two decades, Tina Chancey and her ensemble, Hesperus, have been assembling and performing live music — songs and instrumental works from the Middle Ages, along with period-style improvisation — to accompany such classic silent films as The Mark of Zorro, Robin Hood, and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. - Early Music America
My sense of musical theater in America is that we may undervalue that the higher forms of the Broadway musical are every bit the equal in artistic quality of operas like “Don Giovanni.” - The New York Times
Arifa Akbar: "Crunching or chewing can be a distraction, especially in the confines of the older, tighter West End venues, but theatre is a group activity. … The group experience is what we come for – and that includes jostling in the foyer, coughing, rustling and, yes, eating or drinking." - The Guardian
"Since the 2000s, there has been a chorus of voices emerging from the comic book community decrying Lichtenstein's lifting of comic art — a cribbing so liberal, they say, as to be more plagiarism than appropriation." - Artnet
"(He) wrote some 60 novels, including westerns, mysteries, science and fantasy fiction, and children's books. But he was best known for two series of novels with enormous mass-market appeal: The Kent Family Chronicles, eight volumes written in the 1970s ..., and the North and South Civil War trilogy." - The New York Times
