It's the way the BBC is funded — a flat fee, currently £159 ($217) a year, charged to every household in the UK that has a television. Here's an explanation of how that money is spent, why the fee was just frozen, and why the Tories want to kill it. - BBC
By the time the concert hall opened in 2017, it was six years late and had cost €866 million, ten times the initial budget. Five years on, concert audiences have tripled, subscriptions have quadrupled, and the "Elphi" is a beloved symbol of the entire city. - The Guardian
The far-right National Rally party released a 3½-minute video this weekend showing its presidential candidate speechifying to the camera while walking back and forth in front of the Paris museum — whose management is very unhappy at being dragged directly into politics like this. - Artnet
YouTube’s controversial move to remove public dislike counts in November was aimed at shielding smaller creators from harassment campaigns but has already started to discourage certain viewers from engaging with videos on the platform, new data suggests. -Variety
If the hatchet job ever died, it is — like Gawker — back with a vengeance. In fact, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that the hatchet job is now the dominant mode of literary criticism for the internet era. - Los Angeles Review of Books
There is an assumption that the more scientific the approach to predictions, the more accurate forecasts will be. But this belief causes more problems than it solves, not least because it often either ignores or excludes the lived diversity of human experience.
With audiobooks, voice narrators are (almost) everything. They can make a great story greater and a bad story better. This is especially true with book series. As one book leads to another, a narrator’s voice becomes ever more integral to the listening experience. - Washington Post
The Symphony board could make a statement by requiring, for one thing, that Michael Stern’s successor take up full-time residence in Kansas City. - KCStudio
The process came to a head earlier this month when the IRS, the US tax agency, asserted that the estate was worth $163.2m, twice the $82.3m figure previously submitted by Comerica. The higher valuation meant the IRS would claim substantially more tax. - The Guardian
Shadow culture secretary Lucy Powell said the Government is signalling “the end of the BBC as we know it” in a “pathetic” attempt to distract from Boris Johnson’s difficulties over Downing Street parties. - The Press-Gazette
Joy Harjo’s story is an American epic, a triumph of the spirit, reshaping history’s lens on the West, rewriting a national myth of endless space. - The Daily Beast
Government officials have tried to grapple with the best course of action for monuments that are symbols of both divisiveness and history, balancing the need to confront America’s past without glorifying it. - The Daily Beast
"Copeland says she believes it’s her responsibility to tell the untold stories of trailblazing Black ballerinas who came before her. ... She wants aspiring young Black ballerinas and parents wanting to put their kids into dance classes to know that they do belong." - WBUR (Boston)
Sounds great during a pandemic, right? But the BBC is commercial-free, and the license fee is its income, so when the fee doesn't keep up with inflation, the broadcaster must plan for budget cuts all around. - Variety
