"The Queen's Ball: A 'Bridgerton' Experience" is one of several costume parties quasi-theatrical pop-up events based on famous media franchises (Star Wars and Game of Thrones, for instance) to materialize recently in downtown spaces left vacant in the wake of COVID. Kriston Capps pays a visit. - Bloomberg CityLab
It’s been a slow burn, but Hollywood is finally recognizing a trend corporate America long ago seized upon: The spending power of the 50-something woman. This is the largest demographic, according to a 2018 Forbes report, earning annual salaries of over $100,000. - New York Post
A handsome young Black man surprising Chinese immigrants with fluent Mandarin can amass quite a following on social media. Frankie Light is one of several people who pick up various languages (or, at least, phrases), spring them on native speakers, and post the video on YouTube. - The New York Times
“My goal was very simple: Smithsonian will be the place people point to, to say ‘This is how we should share our collections and think about ethical returns,’” Lonnie G. Bunch III, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, said in an interview. - The New York Times
"The theatre gave no reason for dropping Timofey Kulyabin's production of the opera Don Pasquale and Kirill Serebrennikov's ballet Nureyev, which will be replaced by productions of Rossini's The Barber of Seville and Aram Khachaturian's ballet Spartacus," the latter a piece of patriotic populism from Soviet days. - The Guardian
"Bleak subscriber numbers and the company's response have stirred a mix of angst and uncertainty among many rank-and-file workers. Some are worried that the streaming heavyweight may have hired too fast and grown complacent as subscriber growth skyrocketed in the early days of the pandemic." - Yahoo! (Los Angeles Times)
Japan National Orchestra Co. was founded and is led by 27-year-old CEO Kyohei Sorita, a concert pianist convinced that his band (for now, really a chamber orchestra) can make a profit. JNO has even issued stock, 70% of which is owned by a manufacturer of high-precision machine tools. - Bloomberg
The West End run of ALW's latest musical will conclude on June 12. But the company was told after the Sunday matinee on a holiday weekend in Britain, and many who weren't on that day — including star Carrie Hope Fletcher — got the news the wrong way. - BBC
The city council of the occupied, now-largely-destroyed Ukrainian city says that more than 2,000 works, including paintings by the renowned 19th-century artists Arkhip Kuindzhi and Ivan Aivazovsky, were taken by Russian forces to Donetsk, which has been occupied by Russia since 2014. - The Guardian
Russian soldiers and intelligence officers, along with "a Russian-speaking man in a white lab coat" and a film crew, entered the Melitopol Museum of Local History and stole an entire collection, which had been carefully hidden, of 2,300-year-old Scythian gold ornaments, plates and weapons. - The New York Times
"Julie Finch, … the former CEO of the Cheltenham Trust, … has been appointed CEO of the Hay festival and will succeed founder and former director Peter Florence, who resigned from his role after a bullying claim was upheld last year." - The Guardian
As many cities today grapple with unprecedented housing shortages and cost-of-living issues, the degree to which historic-preservation laws can function as a pretext for preventing change entirely is clearer than ever. - The Atlantic
January 6th was an extreme attack. But it was not a coup d’état. Because a coup d’état is not a demonstrative action, where you go around shouting obscenities and doing noisy things. It’s a thing where you have figured out the control levers of the system and how you can physically dominate them. - The Point
China's growing clout in global media extends beyond movies to the entertainment industry generally. Capital investments by U.S. firms in ventures such as the Shanghai Disney Resort and the Universal Beijing Resort give Chinese officials still more levers with which to control U.S. media conglomerates. - Journal of Democracy
In the persistent wake of the pandemic, the pressure for scholars to self-promote has only intensified. Starved for opportunities to share our latest findings at in-person conferences, we take to Twitter, Instagram, or perhaps our email signature to hype our new books and articles. - Salon
