“Natalie Miroshnyk was at the Warsaw Book Fair for Ukrainian publisher Vivat when she heard that a Russian missile had hit her country’s biggest printing house, killing seven workers, injuring 22 others and destroying 50,000 books.” - Irish Times
Australia’s largest online bookseller announced the move on Wednesday, two weeks after it went into a voluntary suspension of share trading. - The Guardian
Finally, a long stretch of nothing happening, of innumerable plans, tradeoffs, controversies, objections, and delays — that whole impasto of New York–style dithering — has been overwhelmed by the vivid, sensual presence of one of the city’s great public spaces. - New York Magazine (MSN)
Thirty-two dancers total—16 b-boys and 16 b-girls—will compete battle-style in Paris’ Place de la Concorde to sold-out crowds on August 9 and 10. Qualifying competitions have been going on since 2022. - Dance Magazine
Although attendance at the city’s arts institutions remains down from prepandemic levels — with tourism, hotel occupancy and office attendance yet to fully recover — its cultural ecosystem has been showing signs of inching its way back. - The New York Times
Prior to yesterday’s UK general election, she was shadow cabinet minister for international development and has previously held shadow cabinet roles in housing, foreign and commonwealth affairs, and energy and climate change. - Screen Daily
Increasing protests around elements of corporate sponsorship of the arts – most notably last month, when support from investment firm Baillie Gifford for the Hay, Edinburgh and Borders book festivals ended after pressure from Fossil Free Books – are starting to make the sector look too risky for corporate brands to back. - The Guardian
The Malayalam-language film industry, based in the state of Kerala in India's far southwest, never went in for the mythological films or song-dance-melodrama extravaganzas on which Bollywood was built. It simply tells compelling stories about believable people. And it's now breaking out into the rest of India. - The Economist
We make something more likely, more widely believed, by saying and repeating it. Our rhetoric encourages or discourages. Which is why sports teams chant a version of “I believe we will win.” - LitHub
"Just as modern-day government workers suffer neck and spinal injuries from sitting at desks and arching forward to stare at screens, ancient Egyptian scribes endured comparable physical stresses from hunching over papyrus for prolonged sessions." Scribe skeletons show evidence of serious osteoarthritis in the neck, collarbone, arm, thigh, and spine. - Artnet
The previous record holder was a lifesize picture of a wild pig believed to be created at least 45,500 years ago in a cave at Leang Tedongnge. - The Guardian
Once a promising teenage soccer player, Pål Enger decided he was a better criminal than athlete and began a career of art and jewelry thefts interspersed with prison sentences. On opening day of the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Enger took Munch's Scream from Norway's National Gallery in Oslo. - AP
"Until now, Grégory Milan wryly considered his life to be 'a series of failures of sorts.' When he turned to gymnastics choreography full-time, in 2017, he was in debt, having started a dance company that never took off, and still reeling from a tumultuous career in ballet." - The New York Times
