In college, Beatrice Waterhouse started wondering where she could find information about Jews in the ballet world. So she created a Tumblr site, "'People of the Barre' (which, yes, is a play on 'people of the book') and started using the blog to store tidbits she came across about Jews in ballet, mainly for her own reference." - Forward
It's been an expensive and draining series of legal battles. "After three years of courtroom hostilities, the estate of the artist Robert Indiana and the artist’s former business partner said Friday that they had agreed to settle the legal disputes that cost the estate millions of dollars and clouded the market for a man known for such works as...
Living authors like Kate Mosse and Philip Pullman are worried because as Britain exits the EU, protections have changed. "Authors and publishers fear that changing the rules could mean that cheap international editions of a book would pour into the UK, eroding the money authors could make from a domestic sale." - The Guardian (UK)
Komunyakaa: Writing poetry "feels like one has been chosen as a caretaker of observation. There's a certain reality, but also there's a certain kind of dreaming, and that place takes us someplace that we never dreamt of." - NPR
The story of Selena Quintanilla is quintessentially American - so why did Netflix order it as a Latin American original with a tiny budget that meant filming in Mexico and paying writers (and other staff members) much, much less than they would have gotten in the U.S.? "Their love for Selena, the writers said, drove them to take the job...
After a planned protest in one of the school's buildings, the students "were barred from the Diamond building, and the school told them that it was investigating an incident that included reported violations 'pertaining to community safety.' On Thursday, about 20 students continued their tuition protest on the sidewalk outside, waving placards and accusing the school of using heavy-handed...
English Heritage commissioned six portraits to emphasize the history - including Roman emperor Septimius Severus, who ordered the strengthening of Hadrian's Wall while on a trip to Britain. English Heritage's curatorial director: "African figures from the past have played significant roles at some of the historic sites in our care but many of their stories are not very well...
For decades, the literary world disdained historical fiction. "It has been seen as its own fusty fashion, relentlessly uncontemporary and easy to caricature, filled with mothballed characters who wear costumes rather than clothes, use words like 'Prithee!' while having modern-day thoughts, and occasionally encounter villains immediately recognizable by their yellow teeth or suspicious smell. What light could such novels...
The sitcom's actors took to social media to say more about the series' abrupt end - and the series itself. Their posts "threw into sharp relief the ongoing reluctance of producers and executives from Hollywood to Toronto to trust and empower Asian actors, writers and directors to tell their own stories — and as Yoon and Liu both pointed...
The writers, contributors, and freelance editorial workers are prepared to produce a strike issue - or a Labor Peace issue. It all depends on how negotiations end up. - LitHub
Taylor's Real Life hit many "best of" lists for 2020, and a collection of loosely linked short stories comes out this month. "My most formative early reading was the Bible, which haunts me still, and the first author I loved was Pat Conroy, because the lyrical language of The Prince of Tides sounded so much like the Bible. I tried to imitate...
The collection certainly demands a change: "The current facility, which opened in 1997, originally housed a collection of 40 O’Keeffe paintings. The museum had always been looking to expand, Hartley said, but as the years went on and the museum’s permanent collection size increased to more than 3,000 works — the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation donated 981 additional items in...
And it's not just Hollywood. In recent USC study, the researchers "combed through 200 popular films from the U.S., the U.K., Australia and New Zealand from 2017 to 2019. They found that only six of them had a Muslim in a co-leading role, and only one of those was female. Of the nearly 9,000 speaking parts, fewer than two...
