"U.S. video streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video are looking to the Indian market to power their global growth. But their shows are facing the wrath of Hindu nationalists, often linked to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party or BJP, which wields increasing clout over what is acceptable entertainment. Now, the government has stepped in, raising fears about...
"Boris Johnson has used his first interview with a European newspaper since becoming the UK's prime minister to issue a point-blank rejection of the Parthenon marbles being returned to Greece. insisted that the sculptures, removed from the monument by Lord Elgin in circumstances that have since spurred one of the world's most famous cultural rows, would remain in...
Justin Davidson: "No memorial, no matter how grand or artful, can encompass the infinite varieties of pain, or comfort everyone who experienced a global pandemic. So we at New York and Curbed have taken a stab at reducing an event of unimaginable magnitude to a series of local and communal yet personal markers. At our request, and in a...
"Even by the standards of 2020, Jacob's Pillow had a tough year. Not only did the dance center in Becket, Mass., have to cancel its annual summer season for the first time in its history, but it also lost one of its theaters, the Doris Duke, to a fire. But 2021 has begun more brightly: it will hold...
"We added up the total emergency cultural aid packages from nine countries around the globe to show you how they compare. We looked at the size of each country's bailout in dollars, and then calculated what the totals amount to per person in order to account for differences in population size." - Artnet
"The technical department had known that the original had been replaced by a copy since May 2014, when book restorers discovered it by accident during a program to preserve old books from acid-deterioration called IFADU. But despite this discovery, in these four intervening years, the forged copy of Sidereus Nuncius left by the thief continued to appear in the...
The state of the pandemic being what it is just now, management didn't want to cancel the event entirely as they did last year, but concert venues in Austria didn't seem likely to reopen in less than three weeks. So the festival is being transferred from one big Catholic feast to another: it will take place in the days...
The brothers frequently refer to Irish dancing as a “sport”. “It’s not that we don’t consider Irish dancing an art form because obviously it is one,” says Michael. “We consider it a sport because it is extremely athletic but also because of the hours of training that you put in for a World Championship. You’re training every single day,...
While Britain hasn’t seen the cash influx — about $2 billion — that streaming and traditional media companies have spent snapping up the American podcasting companies in recent years, listening numbers here have surged. Nearly a fifth of the British adult population, more than 10 million people, now regularly listen to podcasts; entertainment and tech companies, investors and advertisers...
The Metropolitan Opera House has been dark for a year, and its musicians have gone unpaid for almost as long. The players in one of the finest orchestras in the world suddenly found themselves relying on unemployment benefits, scrambling for virtual teaching gigs, selling the tools of their trade and looking for cheaper housing. About 40 percent left the...
The Washington Post talked to the owners of six indies about how they weathered the year. What follows is an oral history of these shops’ highs and lows as the pandemic knocked life and business upside down. - Washington Post
When Generation X was published, Douglas Coupland observed: “information overload meant 50 TV stations instead of ten.” In the current era where internet connections give access to a previously unimaginable wealth of content, this seems rather quaint. Nonetheless, Generation X’s intuitions help us understand the destabilising effects that the online world has on our sense of self today. -...
As students, Fulford and Gould would argue about music. Fulford was acquiring a taste for jazz and other forms of popular music, which Gould dismissed. Having to argue with someone as informed and quirkily opinionated as Gould forced Fulford into becoming an ad hoc critic, thus beginning a second career on top of journalism. - The Nation
We are aware, of course, that we might be wrong, because we know that on certain issues we have changed our minds, and therefore must have been wrong at least once. Nonetheless, at any given moment, we believe that we are right. The contrary would be ridiculous. - 3 Quarks Daily
Despite the pandemic, book sales were up over all last year, but mostly for places like Amazon; bookstore sales fell by more than twenty-eight per cent. Even at stores where sales held steady or increased, profits declined as customers migrated online, raising shipping and delivery costs. More than one bookstore closed every week in 2020, and many of the...
