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It’s Her Biggest Hit: Mariah Carey Being Sued Over “All I Want For Christmas”

The 53-year-old US singer and her co-writer Walter Afanasieff are named in a lawsuit brought by the songwriter Andy Stone claiming that Carey and her collaborators “knowingly, wilfully, and intentionally engaged in a campaign” to infringe Stone’s copyright for the song. - The Guardian

Assessing Osmo Vanska’s Impact On The Minnesota Orchestra

One of the reasons for Vänskä’s success in Minnesota has been that right from the start he gave the orchestra what it wanted: discipline and hard work. - MinnPost

How Geoff Dyer Fell In Love With The Blues

Listening to Kimbrough and Burnside I feel that, at last, in my early sixties, I’ve entered a corner of that foreign field, that vast and crowded zone of meaning. - The Spectator

Who Is Diagnosing Where We Are In History Right Now?

It is now more than half a century since the heyday of political modernism and the sociological project that accompanied it. Are we still, today, postmodern? Are we really still grappling with the fallout of 1968? - London Review of Books

Those Magazines Of Conspicuous Consumption As The World’s Financial Insecurities Grow

“We engage wealth as a journalistic subject. Tom Wolfe called it ‘plutography.’ At the T&C offices, we call it our ‘crazy money’ stories. - New York Magazine

Fandom Fueled By Social Media Has Gotten Out Of Hand

Fans are increasingly demanding a return for the precious resource of their attention, their clicks and eyeballs and adulation. We may call celebrities influencers, but we want to influence them too. We are the customers, and our gaze is money. - The New York Times

The Internet Has Turned Us All Into Content Machines

“Clickbait” has long been the term for misleading, shallow online articles that exist only to sell ads. But on today’s Internet the term could describe content across every field, from the unmarked ads on an influencer’s Instagram page to pseudonymous pop music designed to game the Spotify algorithm. - The New Yorker

American Theatre Still Lives in Joe Papp’s World

For among the many things this feisty, indomitable leader recognized was that New York City’s five boroughs were as under-served by the arts of his time as any rural community, and that his city’s diverse populations needed and deserved theatre as much as its moneyed elites. - American Theatre

What “MJ” The Musical Tells Us About What Dance Says About You

Often a dancing body reveals a certain truth about a person, but in Jackson’s case dancing might have been one more thing to hide behind, like another costume; it was a place he could control his body. - The New York Times

Republic Of Georgia Fires Dozens Of Curators, Historians, Scientists

Up to 40 employees, including archaeologists, art historians, public relations officers, and scientists, were let go in May, according to the newly formed Georgian Trade Union of Science, Education, and Culture Workers. They were fired as a part of an investigation into the “competence” of staff members. - Artnet

Arts Organizations Back Away From Global Aspirations

Arts administrators are starting to try to measure things like mental and even physical wellbeing as a gauge of how successful their programs are, and are using terms like "impact framework." The idea, at heart, is that the arts are a means to an end, rather than being an end in themselves. - Axios

A Meditation On Originality And Plagiarism

Writers are indeed an incestuous little bunch eternally doomed to borrow, copy, steal, plagiarize, allude to, accidentally repeat, consciously imitate, alternately praise and denigrate each other’s work. Originality held aloft by its own purity in some Platonic realm . . . no, it doesn’t exist. - The Smart Set

The Shiny New Laguardia Airport: Haunted By The Old

Can any terminal relieve the misery and anxiety around flying these days? Let us peer into the future envisioned by the $8 billion reboot of New York’s cramped and dilapidated LaGuardia Airport. - Bloomberg

Why Won’t The Boomers Let Go?

Our model of social change is still rooted in midcentury clichés. Younger Americans imagine that starting a family and owning a home was much easier for previous generations than it really was. They buy the broad outlines of the boomers’ nostalgia and take it to mean they are inheriting a desiccated society. - The New York Times

Composer Ingram Marshall, 80

He was sometimes called a post-minimalist, but he disliked the term, suggesting postmodernist as an alternative. But his music also embraced a time-expanding element — a sense of slowly unfolding — born of his fascination with the Indonesian gamelan. - Washington Post

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