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Justifying Why Princeton Should Exist

This is the puzzle of Princeton: How can an institution designed to serve the aspirations of an elite few authentically wrestle with issues of inequality and racism in society? - The Atlantic

How To Explain Trump’s Love Of The Musical “Cats”?

What Trump is soothed by, perhaps, is not the sentimentality of the song alone but a tensile line of steel to which, Betty Buckley thinks, conceivably with undue generosity, he may even be unconsciously sensitive. - The New Yorker

Why Big Movies Don’t Shoot In Washington State

“For better or for worse, film is an incentivized industry. Around 38 states have programs to incentivize film production. We are always at the bottom of that list.” - Seattle Times

When Facebook Went Down Last Week, News Searches And Traffic Went Way Up

Sure, some of that was people searching for news about Facebook's outage. However: "For a whopping five-hours-plus, people read news, according to data Chartbeat gave us this week from its thousands of publisher clients across 60 countries." - Nieman Lab

How To Survive Being The Subject Of A Documentary

It helps if you're also the writer-director of the documentary, or the sister or parents of said writer-director. But the intense focus is far from easy. - Los Angeles Times

Conducting Isn’t Easy, And Then You Add In The Dancers

Australia Ballet conductor-in-training Alexander Rodrigues says conducting an orchestra for ballet is a true challenge, thinking about the music's past, present, and future - "And you’re balancing the music with the dance, the tempos of that." - Sydney Morning Herald

How Julie Taymor Went From Directing Opera And Off-Broadway To Disney

She was reluctant to do Lion King. "I was interested in the avant-garde. I didn’t have any interest in commercial theatre. I hadn’t even seen the animated cartoon, which surprised Tom Schumacher." But then ... the animals called. - Irish Times

Nobel Prizewinner Abdulrazak Gurnah Has Some Strong Words For Europe

Gurnah, who is from Tanzania and lives in Britain, said, "People don't come with nothing, they come with their youth, their energy, their potential. ... Just to stay on the idea 'they are there, they are coming to steal something of our prosperity' is inhumane." - Le Figaro

An Attempt To Remake The Western, Via Covid Protocols And Great Britain

The Harder They Fall is "righteous and rowdy" - and has a Black British musician director who says that his music and films come from the same place: "When I’m writing and these words are coming out, so are melodies and song and score." - The Guardian (UK)

The Curator Who Can’t Live Without Sculpture

Claire Lilley, who placed 18 sculptures for the London Frieze Sculpture show this year: "I love how we as humans occupy the same space as sculpture. I’ve seen people press their entire bodies against sculptures and hug them." - The New York Times

It’s Time To Start With Oscar Predictions

That seems wild, since this year's version was recent - and grim. "The Oscars’ class of 2020 included plenty of good films ... seen only on small screens, unleashed upon an isolated and atomized populace, in the middle of a brutal pandemic winter." - Vulture

Cuban Artist Tania Bruguera Left The Island In Exchange For The Release Of Political Prisoners

The activist artist says she accepted a position at Harvard after telling the regime, "Look, you want me to leave, well now you have an opportunity. ... But I’ll leave on the condition that you release , and I handed a list of several people." - Hyperallergic

Peter Bunnell, Who Forced The Art World To Take Photography Seriously, 83

"It is a measure of Professor Bunnell’s success that today photography is unquestionably accepted as both a fine art and a discipline worthy of historical scholarship. Things were different in the late 1950s, when he entered college." - The New York Times

Musicians And Venues Struggle To Balance Safety With The Joy Of Finally Having Performances

Rock musician Dave Grohl speaks for pretty much every performer: "You wake up every day, cross your fingers that they’ll open a door, turn on the lights and we’ll have a ... show. It’s not guaranteed." - Washington Post

This Netflix Exec Wants British Talent To Come Back To The UK

Fiona Lamptey's vision: "I really want to bring back our stars, like people that have to leave their home to go make a film that feels aspirational, or ambitious, and that they can get paid for ... those projects that kind of feel big for the U.K." - Variety

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