The English vocabulary is especially limited, with only 170,000 or so words in an English dictionary. What does this mean to the art writer trying to capture a brushstroke? You fall back on tried and true descriptors like lush, bold, tentative, delicate. - LitHub
“Funding and the politics of funding within the Australia Council is dominated by performing arts, the lion’s share of funds goes to performing arts bodies, and it is essentially a performing-arts grants body. It’s time it was recognised as such, and literature split from it.” - The Guardian
It seems logical that an orchestra’s basic tools of sound production – tone colour, dynamics, rhythmic precision and articulation – are strongly influenced by their home concert hall, so much so that they continue to manifest those integrated sonic fingerprints in unfamiliar acoustical environments. - The Strad
Each museum that pledges to surrender some or all of its African collection intensifies the pressure on the holdout institutions to follow. But each of these pledges also intensifies the uncertainty about what exactly is being pledged. What does it mean to return an object “to Nigeria”? - The Atlantic
"Rather than a crime drama in the vein of the Scamming Show canon, Better Call Saul is perhaps best understood as an unlikely Künstlerroman — the story of an artist coming into his own ... an artist whose medium just happens to be scamming." - The Point
This revival’s story is the real-life version of Smash, NBC’s own campy drama about casting the perfect lead; from previews to present day, Funny Girl has been Broadway drama made for TV, played out by TV actors with Broadway voices. - The Ringer
"If it shocks us that the novelist was attacked after so long, it should also shock us that commentary looks much as it did thirty years ago. ... The effect is to obscure the central historical question: how, exactly, the publication of Rushdie's novel became a global geopolitical phenomenon." - Boston Review
Unlike search or social media, whose arrivals the general public encountered and discussed and had opinions about, artificial intelligence remains esoteric—every bit as important and transformative as the other great tech disruptions, but more obscure, tucked largely out of view. - The Atlantic
"What I'm really hoping for is we develop our own style. A hyper-musical, full-port-de-bras style layered with joy, with beautifully coordinated dancers ... who can do classical and contemporary work. A style that, when our dancers are seen elsewhere, people say 'Oh, you must be from Cincinnati Ballet.'" - Pointe Magazine
Anything, including revolution, can be repurposed as comfort right now. Nostalgia isn’t just for conservatives—we are in the time of the derriere-garde, experimental hygge, the avant-cozy. - The New Yorker
In a longread laid out like a choose-your-own-adventure tale, Leslie Jamison looks at why kids adore the books (agency!), their own origin story, how authors approach them, and the series's progeny (e.g., Neil Patrick Harris's Choose Your Own Autobiography or the choose-your-own-Macbeth-play Sleep No More). - The New Yorker
The paper, published last month in the peer-reviewed AI Magazine, is a fascinating one that tries to think through how artificial intelligence could pose an existential risk to humanity by looking at how reward systems might be artificially constructed. - Vice
"The prompter is invisible to the audience, and he may be only one person among the roughly 250-strong cast and crew, but he plays a major role in keeping everything from flying off the rails." Meet Matthew Piatt, San Francisco Opera's prompter for John Adams's Antony and Cleopatra. - NPR
"Preserving the rhythm, the sound, and the sensibility of the original musical while translating its dense libretto into a language characterized by multisyllabic compound nouns and sentences that often end with verbs, and all in a society that has minimal familiarity with the show's subject matter." - The New York Times
For instance, Alexander Hamilton in "The World Was Wide Enough" —
English: "America, you great unfinished symphony, you sent for me."
German: "America, durch deine Brust pumpt Sklavenblut, Moral und Wut."
("America, through your breast is pounding the blood of slaves, morality and rage.")
- The New York Times
