"The history of African country music is largely uncharted. When you piece together the fragments, a long and rich musical relationship begins to emerge. It starts in the 1930s, according to writer Jesse Jarnow, and differs hugely across the continent." - The Guardian
What these projects have in common — and what distinguishes them from Martin’s early days as the only guy onstage — is that he now eagerly shares the workload on almost every endeavor he tackles. - The Hollywood Reporter
"Nepal's Kusunda language has no known origin and a number of quirks, like no words for 'yes' or 'no'. It also has only one fluent speaker left, something linguists are racing to change." - BBC
"The A-list is a shrinking paddock of ageing thoroughbreds. All five films in the top 100 this year that might be called 'star vehicles' ... feature leads who found fame in the '90s, with an average age of 56." - The Guardian
"According to recent findings from analytics company Apptopia, 99 percent of the service's users have never touched a single video game on the platform. ... It would be easy to say the streaming giant isn't gaining gamers because their offerings are bad, but they're not." - Wired
Lily Janiak: "Recently, I heard about three artistic director resignations all in a single week. ... Three points do not a data set make, but it still felt like a wave within a wave. So I wondered: What's the deal with all these theater leaders leaving their jobs?" - San Francisco Chronicle
Patterned after the famous "Monuments Men" who tracked down treasures looted by the Nazis, a group of archivists, archaeologists, art historians, and other specialists are training as military reservists, ready to assist during armed conflicts. One specialist described it as "cultural first aid" training. - MSN (The Washington Post)
"The J. Paul Getty Museum is returning its Orpheus group of sculptures — a significant group of nearly life-size terra-cotta figures known as 'Orpheus and the Sirens,' some of the museum's greatest antiquities — to Italy. The objects ... have been determined to have been illegally excavated and exported." - Yahoo! (Los Angeles Times)
"(The American Library Association) says it is 'developing guidance' for libraries and library workers and working with other organizations to 'oppose any efforts to limit access to constitutionally protected information or limit privacy protections' for library users." - Publishers Weekly
Many words we consider, at best, crude were medieval common-or-garden words of description and were not considered obscene. To say ‘I’m going to piss’ was the equivalent of saying ‘I’m going to wee’ today and was politer than the new 16th-century vulgarity, ‘I’m going to take a leak’. - History Today
Most often the role of the poet-critic is neither to delineate nor disseminate, but rather to illuminate. In such manner the main subject of the poet-critic, versus that of the literary critic or reviewer, is poetry itself. - Salmagundi
There is no controversy in saying that a single organism wants to remain alive. Even bacteria purposefully move toward where there is more sugar. But things get more complicated when we ask whether all of life shares a collective sense of purpose. - Big Think
Rather than not build at all, he was prepared to build what the dictator demanded of him. As a result, Boris Iofan is now remembered not for his considerable talent, but for the way that his buildings came to define Stalinist architecture as it was practiced from Warsaw to Beijing. - MITReader
We live in an age when identity is intimately tied to cultural consumption. Trying to be everything to all people is a risky strategy in a world that already has Netflix. - Washington Post
