A performance titled Passions croisées (Crossed Passions) in a historic Strasbourg church featured Pergolesi's Stabat Mater accompanied by athletic (and non-raunchy) pole and silk dancing by former champion Vincent Grobelny. The priest of the church rented for the performance then received letters saying he should be beheaded. - Yahoo! (AFP)
"It's hard to find anywhere in the food universe that wasn't touched by (her) pen or panache. She helped shape modern food writing as a mix of storytelling, history and a worldly palate. Her relentlessly curious tastes were also part of a major shift in American eating." - MSN (The Washington Post)
A poll published found 61 percent were more concerned that “some schools may ban books and censor topics that are educationally important” than by the prospect that instructional materials might offend students or parents. That skepticism isn’t partisan, either. - Washington Post
The vision that he outlined was grand. It included restoring the largely bombed-out building of the regional administration as a functional monument, the way Norman Foster did with the former Reichstag building in Berlin by capping it with a giant glass dome. - The New Yorker
The first and most obvious reason is inertia. Journalists spent more than a decade building up their presences on Twitter, and they were never going to abandon the site collectively overnight. - Platformer
"You know how some movies bomb with critics but still make millions at the box office? We were the inverse of that. We had walkouts, of course, but also snickering, jeering, dumbfounded faces, searing reviews, refunds demanded, boos..." - HowlRound
It’s suddenly plausible to imagine that freethinking, that tradition of poking and prodding at all fixed ideas and institutions, will drift into obsolescence, because an oracular machine will instantly spit back answers to life’s questions with an aura of scientific authority. - The Atlantic
It's the first live work in North America for beloved Dutch choreographer Nanine Linning, and among her many collaborators are video artist Heleen Blanken and scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who provided video material and extensive consultations with the creative team. - MSN (The Boston Globe)
A businessman who made more than £1m selling fake vinyl records was caught after a fan of punk band the Clash complained that the sound quality of an LP he had bought was not as sharp as it should have been. - The Guardian
"From a very early age Kusama has suffered from severe panic attacks and hallucinations, episodes during which pumpkins might talk to her, which is nice, or a sense that an entire universe of patterns was eliminating her, which is not." - Literary Hub
Twenty-seven years, reams of research and hundreds of thousands of dollars later, Ayers’ associates have come forward to claim the artwork, called the Flaget Madonna, as a work from the studio of Raphael, an Italian painter from the High Renaissance. - Chicago Tribune
"In the new visibility, the literary translator possesses a different sort of identity: still the articulate spokesperson for another language and culture, but self-conscious as an interpreter, at once scholarly and creative. The translator as writerly intellectual." - Literary Hub
E-books that had been published and sold in one form were retroactively (and irrevocably) altered, highlighting what consumer rights experts say is a convention of digital publishing that customers may never notice or realize they signed up for. Buying an e-book doesn’t necessarily mean it’s yours. - The New York Times
"There is no question that, because of their size, Dallas's big seven arts groups depend more heavily on attendance than others in the region. Here, we take a look at the big seven and how they're coping." - MSN (The Dallas Morning News)
