“Giving people the reality — here’s the information, here’s a way to contextualize the moment we are in — you can’t build optimism unless you face the reality of the past, the reality of today.” - Washington Post
A large community has grown up around a now-outdated version of the online game RuneScape — and many players in rich countries don't want to slog through the tasks required to build their characters' skills or hoards of gold. - Slate
“It’s called ‘trailerizing’ a song. That means changing every aspect of the song but leaving the lyrics. People know the lyrics. The goal is to catch people’s attention." - Variety
The group, which for decades has been one of the world's most admired of its kind, said in a statement that it will close up shop in 2023, after what will have been 47 years. - Vulture
Spencer Elden claims that the band exploited him with what he now calls child pornography — but he's been exploiting that image of his infant self for some time. His actual grudge appears to be over an art show. - Artnet
The company's return to live performance, Verdi's Il trovatore, was to use sets from the Opéra de Monte-Carlo — but they're on a container ship stuck in the giant traffic jam at the Port of Los Angeles. But that won't stop L.A. Opera. - Los Angeles Times
"Prosecutors say Mehrdad Sadigh, a New York antiquities dealer whose Sadigh Gallery has operated for decades in the shadow of the Empire State Building, decided not to go to the trouble of acquiring ancient items. He made (thousands of) bogus copies instead." - The New York Times
The 68-year-old chief conductor of the BBC Concert Orchestra, formerly music director of the Vancouver and Winnipeg Symphonies and Calgary Opera, begins a five-year contract term on next week and fully assumes the music director title in Sept. 2022. - Sarasota Herald-Tribune
Archaeologists using new measuring techniques have analyzed layers of a mineral glaze covering ancient figures in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, and the oldest layer appears to date back more than 40 millennia. - ABC (Australia)
"Lynne Halfpenny … insisted the Old Town and the Royal Mile had become overwhelmed with visitors and was seen as a 'bucket list' destination because of Edinburgh's UNESCO designation and not its 'festival city' status." - The Scotsman
Given such limited capacity and the pent-up eagerness of ballet fans, all four performances were fully booked almost as soon as they were announced. - Toronto Star
“A theater is best expressed by the work it initiates. I think it’s really important that we not just bring in the great work but that we make the great work. We haven’t even begun to express the city and its fullness.” - Los Angeles Times
The idea of the urban rambler—the flâneur—as a half-belonging creature took hold in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and adopted a variety of forms in the twentieth. - The New Yorker
What’s changed is not that art fairs have been diminished but that the auction houses built broader sales and marketing platforms in the years leading up to the pandemic, which have turned out to be effective at serving a large new audience for art. - ARTnews
Watts’s drumming was unique. He differed from his peers in the rock drumming pantheon, partly due to being a jazz aficionado, a sensibility that he took to the music of the Stones, and also through his self-contained manner. - The Conversation
