"Making stories was how Nichols coped with the world. The biographical question is: why was there a need to cope? The answer is not mysterious. Nichols was unusually self-aware, and he liked to talk about his life. To some extent, the Mike Nichols story is a story by Mike Nichols." - The New Yorker
Performances for kids in schools are the only ones allowed under current COVID restrictions, so puppet shows are the only live theatre happening in France now. "The situation for French puppeteers is bittersweet. While it constitutes a return to their roots, as children remain their most faithful fans, many of them have worked hard to position the form as...
"'My hunch is that, for some women, having me present means they have to examine their past experiences on set without an intimacy coordinator,' said Mia Schachter, intimacy coordinator on ABC's Grey's Anatomy and HBO shows such as Insecure and Euphoria." - The Guardian
Two different studies — one by the Louvre, the other by an independent art historian and her AI researcher husband — find that the Christ figure's hand raised in blessing was added to the otherwise finished painting after the fact. The image recognition algorithm developed by the couple indicates that the hand was not by Leonardo (probably by an...
Linda-Denise Fisher-Harrell dropped out of Juilliard at age 19 to join the company, where she danced for three years before moving on to 13 years with Ailey. After retiring from the stage in 2005, she got a graduate degree and went home to Baltimore to teach. Now, as HSDC's artistic director, "she is tasked with culling an artistic identity...
"The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles was privately warned in 2002 that a Gauguin sculpture it had just bought for around $4m was a fake. A few months later the museum sent a researcher from Los Angeles to Paris to investigate, but she failed to resolve the question — so the matter remained unpursued with the Wildenstein...
Britain's relief package for businesses closed by COVID provides 80% of a furloughed employee's salary, even if that salary is only minimum wage. Workers at the country's most popular bookstore chain, most of whom only make minimum wage or a bit more in normal times, are publicly begging the company to top up the government aid. Management says they'd...
The reality is that many questions surround composer pay. Some people wonder why they’re not being paid more. Some people are surprised by the amounts they have been paid. Some people worry they should have gotten more, but weren’t bold enough to ask for it. Some composers get asked to name their number. Others are told, “this is the...
It was with no small amount of happiness that Center Theatre Group this week said it had generated more than $700,000 through a single fundraising event: a boisterous Zoom party featuring an impressive list of theater makers and celebrities. The event was part of the RWQuarantunes program, launched last year by WME partner Richard Weitz and his teenage daughter,...
"Was there a connection between the sudden relevance of medieval anecdotes and an apparent increase in blackletter fonts on leftist social media? If plague humor was in, so too were ornate, eye-catching fonts derived from a Gothic style. And as platforms such as Instagram evolved last summer—becoming more text-heavy, politicized, and less about the passive consumption of lifestyle imagery—text-based...
"I think we’re witnessing, in real time, society grappling with the emergence of social media as a very powerful force. Experts who have been studying this stuff have been warning for months, if not years, that these types of disturbances could happen as a result of online platforms. And this isn’t the first time that we’ve seen social media...
Are we really just pleasure-seeking audiences looking for that instant hit of media indulgence? As the effects of lockdown and zoom fatigue have exposed, society seems to be increasingly experiencing media fatigue. - The Conversation
“History is full of civilizations that have collapsed, followed by people who have had other ways of living,” Kirkpatrick Sale said. “My optimism is based on the certainty that civilization will collapse.” - Wired
A look at how small groups of (properly tested and quarantined) dancers and choreographers got together (at long last!) to make work this past summer at two centers of dance in the Hudson River Valley. - The Washington Post
The vast majority, 96%, were discovered by metal detecting. Norfolk, Lincolnshire, Essex and Hampshire were identified as hotspots for treasure with more than 80 pieces found in each county during 2019. There are approximately 20,000 detectorists in England and Wales, and 348 of their discoveries were acquired by or donated to UK museums in 2019. Of the found treasure,...
