Dr. Richard Kurin, founder of the Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative, writes about how the Washington museum complex, along with the Louvre, the World Monuments Fund and the ALIPH Foundation, have helped Iraq's State Board of Antiquities and Heritage restore the ravaged institution. - Smithsonian Magazine
"It will be a relatively short book, a couple of hundred pages. It's not the easiest book in the world to write but it's something I need to get past in order to do anything else. … So I just have to deal with it." - The Guardian
"Cheers broke out in the Oklahoma House of Representatives as lawmakers approved the bill that reauthorizes OETA (the Oklahoma Educational Television Authority) as a state entity for at least another three years. The Senate added its override vote a few hours later." - Deadline
Our remix culture has democratized art by letting anyone with a phone create new art from the pieces of previous works. The Supreme Court’s decision “stymies and suppresses that process,” as Kagan put it, in ways that we might not fully understand for years. - Slate
Designed by Bauhaus-trained architect Marcel Breuer, the building has had its share of occupants since it was erected. It was first the third home to the Whitney from 1966 until 2014, before the museum moved into its current residence in the Meatpacking District in May 2015. - Hyperallergic
From out-of-body experiences to entering a dream-like state, Swift's fans - or Swifties as they prefer to be known - have taken to social media in recent days to reveal their guilt at not being able to remember key moments from the Eras tour. - BBC
Behind the scenes, Toronto’s largest theatre festival was struggling. Audience attendance fell below expectations. Fundraising efforts came up short. All that while the festival saw COVID subsidies wind up and operating costs increase. - Toronto Star
The decline of the newsroom itself is not the same thing as the decline of media, and conflating the two obscures how the newsroom culture venerated by legacy journalists is precisely what needs to die so that the industry itself can survive. - The Walrus
The dancer-turned choreographer joined the Fort Worth company as associate artistic director in 2002 and was appointed acting artistic director last summer when Ben Stevenson retired. - The Ballet Herald
Fresno voters approved a ⅜-cent local sales tax, with 12% earmarked for arts and culture, in 2018; the city awards the first grants this summer. But the plan for administering the grants looks, to many arts folk in Fresno, like a money grab by the parks department. - The Fresno Bee
The president has his national-security advisers, who are expressing concern about what China could do with a technology in the pockets of 150 million Americans. To the other, the president has his political advisers, who are looking ahead to yet another election where it looks like everything will be on the line. - New York Magazine
"'We started cooking up this idea of showing students or classes written manuscripts and saying, 'What do you think?' To show them the process as it went along.' And so the Young Editors Project was born." - The New York Times Book Review
Many theaters also went into 2020 with thin margins and may have survived only because of federal pandemic relief programs. Now cinemas are spending millions of dollars to beef up their offerings and surpass moviegoing of old. - The New York Times
"Released in 1998, the film about one man living in a fabricated reality concocted by TV producers made an impact, but ... in subsequent years, it has come to embody a myriad of cultural anxieties – about omnipresent surveillance, mass voyeurism, and the reality TV craze that has swept the globe." - BBC
