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New Record: Bruce Springsteen Sells His Catalog For $500 Million

In March, Bob Dylan sold his catalog to Universal Music for a reported $300 million. Earlier this week, Primary Wave purchased James Brown’s music assets for $90 million. - Los Angeles Times

Painting Is Stolen, Then Replaced With Smaller Painting, Which Is Also Stolen…

A controversial painting was stolen from the Catholic University of America campus last month. When it was replaced by a smaller copy of the same image, that painting was also stolen. - InsideHigherEd

Lessons From Hollywood’s Digital Transition

While digital transformation was creating abundance in the scarce resources that had previously defined market power, it was also creating a new scarce resource, and therefore a new source of competitive advantage: customer attention. - Harvard Business Review

Why Did The New “West Side Story” Movie Make The Tomboy Character Trans? Because Maybe Ze Was The Whole Time

"In this milieu, a Cold War culture dedicated to conformity and shot through with Freudian panic about emasculation, audiences could glimpse Anybodys, a character who refuses to conform, refuses the ironclad terms of gender, in bold ways." So Tony Kushner and Stephen Sondheim went for it. - Slate

The 1920s Russian Novel That Anticipated Totalitarianism

People don’t have proper names; they are marked by a combination of letters and numbers, like the inmates of Nazi camps. They wear identical clothes, their hair is uniformly shorn, their food is synthetic and purely utilitarian, and their homes are identical and transparent. - The New Yorker

Met Opera Will Require All Audience Members And Staffers To Get COVID Booster Shots

"The Met is the first major performing arts organization in the city to announce a booster-shot mandate that will apply to audiences as well as staff members; the new rule will take effect Jan. 17." - The New York Times

The Problem With Media Consolidation

Today, the media industry has consolidated under fewer owners than ever before; its labour conditions have grown dire. The undeniable expertise of many journalists isn’t enough to restore public credibility in the press. The political problem will require a political, not merely a technical, fix. - Psyche

Album Of Actual Bird Calls Makes Top Five On Australia’s Charts

"Songs of Disappearance is surpassing the likes of Abba and The Weeknd - not to mention Christmas favourites Michael Bublé and Mariah Carey. Created by BirdLife Australia, the album features the birdsongs of 53 of Australia's most threatened species." - BBC

Redefining Mainstream American Music

 “We can perform this music in the concert hall, we can talk about this music. But until people are just hearing it on an everyday, run-of-the-mill, hearing-it-in-your-car basis, nothing really shifts.” - DCMetro Theatre Arts

China’s Government Has A Flock Of Foreign YouTubers Making Videos About How Great The Place Is

" new social media personalities … paint cheery portraits of life as foreigners in China — and also hit back at criticisms of Beijing's authoritarian governance, its policies toward ethnic minorities and its handling of the coronavirus." - The New York Times

The Rocket Scientist Who’s Also A Principal Ballerina

Kelley Hashemi’s day job is as an aeronautical engineer at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, where she leads a research team working to integrate automation into the national airspace. She's also a principal dancer with the Peninsula Ballet Theatre. - San Francisco Chronicle

An Incomplete List Of The Writers, Editors, And Great Literary Minds We Lost This Year

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Larry McMurtry, Janet Malcolm, Greg Tate, bell hooks, and so many more. - Literary Hub

The Guardian Now Has More Than A Million Online — Well, Subscribers Isn’t The Right Word

The site has no paywall; the model is like that of public radio in the US: convince visitors to contribute. Now more than 1 million people worldwide make recurring donations, nearly double the number three years ago. (The Guardian also has 100,000 print subscribers.) - Axios

Orlando Ballet Names New Artistic Director

Jorden Morris had been hired as this season's interim artistic director in August, just after Robert Hill resigned with immediate effect after 13 years. Morris now has the position full-time, with a contract running through the 2024-25 season. - Orlando Sentinel

UNESCO Adds Arabic Calligraphy To Its “Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity” List

Congratulations, but isn't this a bit like putting, say, European portraiture on the list? Calligraphy is one of the most basic, fundamental genres of Arabic visual art. - ARTnews

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