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The Alluring Aroma Of Old Books

There are old books and there are old books. Sometimes opening one that I have innocently purchased for 3.99 plus postage can feel like I’ve inhaled enough mold spores to start growing a very large inner book colony. - 3 Quarks Daily

Calculating The Moral Value Of The Distant Future

Unless you think—and some philosophers do think this—that the large-scale future consequences of our practices don’t matter at all, it’s hard to see how the technical tools used to predict and quantify those consequences could be a poor fit for a book of applied ethics. - City Journal

Reconsidering The Music Groupie

The argument for me as groupie is more complex than the definition of the term. Groupies were women who hung around bands. They were crucial to any music scene, alongside musicians and bands, other fans, and the inevitable young music writer trying to make a name for themselves. - The Walrus

Audiences For TV Soap Operas Are Falling Off

One of soap operas' major problems in recent times has been a failure to bring in new fans on top of their existing ones. Much of culture right now is preoccupied with nostalgia, from the endless stream of reboots and remakes, to "all stars" reality shows. - BBC

Fear Of Cancel Culture Makes Me Wonder…

The experience made me wonder: Why do we assume that cancel culture is a pervasive reality, and what’s the impact of that assumption? - The Atlantic

Why Aren’t Dallas Audiences Returning After COVID?

Audiences are being more selective, according to researchers and arts leaders across the region. Some are scared to gather in crowded indoor venues. Others have lost the habit of attending. Still others are avoiding the hassle of driving and parking, instead staying at home. - KERA

Why Peter Schjeldahl Mattered As A Critic

Schjeldahl was a belletrist as a writer — a once fashionable, now vaguely disreputable genre of fiction, poetry and essay writing with an acute concern for “fine language,” which he, virtually alone, managed to make worthwhile for art criticism during a dense era of academically minded theory. - Los Angeles Times

A Bookstore With Blood On Its Walls Opens In Time For Halloween

Or, if you like horror books, then it's also Hanukkah and Christmas and Solstice and Valentine's Day rolled up into one in Louisville, where Butcher Cabin Books sports (fake) blood over its entire façade as well. - NPR

Geoff Nuttall Of The St. Lawrence Quartet Has Died At 56

Nuttall, who also ran the chamber music series at the Spoleto Festival, was a violinist, "a charismatic musician who played boldly," with an "electrifying ability to engage flowed from his deep desire to communicate." - The New York Times

Climate Activists Throw Mashed Potatoes At A Monet

"People are starving, people are freezing, people are dying. We are in a climate catastrophe. And all you are afraid of is tomato soup," one said, referencing last week's climate action of tomato soup on a Van Gogh painting. - NBC News

Choreography As Group Protest

Emily Johnson's "expansive work often brings its viewer-participants into outdoor public spaces, drawing our attention to the land beneath and around us — to what has been here before and what could be in the future." - The New York Times

The Secrets Of A Great Writers’ Room

According to Abbott Elementary's Brittani Nichols, writers getting to produce episodes means something important, and it keeps the writers' room bonded, on track, and earning real credit for their work. - Slate

Carmen Callil, 84, Who Founded Virago Press And Introduced Atwood To The UK

Callil "championed female writers and transformed the canon of English literature," including by bringing many women authors back into print. - The Guardian (UK)

Playwright Martyna Majok Wants To Believe In Theatre’s Magic

And her play, new to Broadway, is "about 'the precarity of life' — the way that one bad break, financial or physical or emotional, can tumble a person into desperation — and the need we all have to be taken care of." - The New York Times

Moshe Safdie Said He Paid A Price For Not Being A Postmodernist

Rowan Moore: "Once, Moshe Safdie was the future. Then he wasn’t. Now, decades later, it turns out that, after all, he was." - The Observer (UK)

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