"It's long, flat and electrified, with strings stretched over frets along a wooden body. Beneath them are black and white markers corresponding to the notes on a piano. ... A note sounds only when a string touches a fret, and that's done with any number of fingers." - MSN (The Washington Post)
With a years-long civil war in Mali cutting off access, you simply cannot get to the historic city from abroad. But you can still send postcards to loved ones from there. - Atlas Obscura
Joan Acocella reminds us how utterly different the character and narrative in the original novel by Carlo Collodi are from Walt Disney's 1940 movie. The story has been remade and adapted dozens of times since; Hollywood has two more on the way and a third in the works. - The New Yorker
Swearing can abuse people or amuse them, inspire doubt or trust (or both) in others, and measurably relieve stress or pain — if you do it properly. "When it comes to your well-being," writes Arthur C. Brooks, "I offer three rules to keep in mind while honing your cursing technique." - The Atlantic
"The challenge, then, becomes finding a way of thinking about animal minds that doesn't simply view them as like the human mind with the dials turned down: less intelligent, less conscious, more or less distant from the pinnacle of mentation we represent." - The Guardian
When Flint Repertory Theatre artistic director Michael Lluberes contacted Tom Jones, the musical's playwright/lyricist, requesting approval to do the show with two young men as the central couple, Jones decided to go through the entire 60-year-old script and make adjustments. Many people think it works even better this way. - American Theatre
"With an unlikely fusion of loose, stream-of-consciousness forms and old-school contrapuntal technique, he constructed monoliths of sound, then obscured them. ... I felt I'd found a mentor who related to music the way I wanted to: with curiosity, open-mindedness and little regard for historical period or genre." - The New York Times
After a wave of outrage over the original story erupted not only on social media but among the newspaper's staff, the column in question was removed and replaced with the columnist's apology. The Herald's editor has expressed contrition as well. - The Guardian
"A group of 200 top writers, producers and directors have signed an open letter backed by the Brady gun violence organization that includes a pledge to incorporate gun safety best practices into their shows and to scrutinize the use of firearms in storytelling." - Variety
"Beginning in the spring and accelerating this month, the 250-title chain is cutting back opinion pages to a few days a week while refocusing what opinion is still published to community dialogue." (Regional editors have the option of reprinting editorials from USA Today.) - Poynter
The problems of informal payments and freeports mean that "Western collectors are buying without fear of much reprisal, despite the already present provisions in international law that prohibit pillaging and include it as a war crime." - NPR
Half of Laura Fernandez's family is Ukrainian, so when the then-Stanislavsky Theatre first soloist heard her Russian peers describe "the destruction of the Ukrainian city of Mariupol as a 'liberation,'" she knew she had to go. - The Guardian (UK)
Some physicists bat it around, with the help of art: "We meet up, sometimes over a drink, to exchange ideas and share our latest musings in cosmology or molecular biology. We have often stayed up late talking while listening to our favourite jazz or flamenco musicians." - New Scientist
