After Confederation, some of the country’s oldest records were stashed in a loft in the reading room of the Centre Block on Parliament Hill. That’s where a fire started in 1916 that destroyed the whole building, along with many historic treasures. - The Walrus
Links Hall, long the hub of contemporary dance in Chicago, closed permanently in June. This raises two questions: Is there a crisis coming for small, independent arts venues? Where in the city can cutting-edge dance be presented now? Journalist Courtney Kueppers spoke with three Chicago dancemakers about what comes next. - WBEZ (Chicago)
The 43-year-old Hrůša is currently chief conductor of Germany’s Bamberg Symphony; he becomes music director of the Royal Opera House in London this fall. He has been the Czech Philharmonic’s principal guest conductor since 2018; he succeeds Semyon Bychkov as chief in 2028. - AP
At Repertory Dance Theatre, Linda C. Smith is retiring after 42 years as artistic director, 39 of them as executive director as well; two company executives will jointly fill those roles. At Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, artistic director Daniel Charon is stepping down after 13 years, replaced by Leslie Kraus. - The Salt Lake Tribune
“Relooted (is) a side-scrolling puzzle platformer — think early Tomb Raider or Prince of Persia games — where players join a crew of Robin Hood-esque thieves staging elaborate heists to take back stolen artifacts from Western museums and repatriate them to the peoples from whom they were taken.” - ARTnews
“The Netherlands (has) returned 119 artifacts looted from Nigeria, including human and animal figures, plaques, royal regalia and a bell. … During the handover ceremony in Edo State, Oba Ewuare II, the monarch and custodian of Benin culture, described the return of the artifacts as a ‘divine intervention.’” - AP
Less than a week after founding artistic directors David Finckel and Wu Han announced their 2026 departure, their successors have been revealed. They are longtime Music@Menlo participants Dmitri Atapine and Hyeyeon Park; like Finckel and Wu Han, they are a married cellist-pianist couple. - San Francisco Classical Voice
The wing’s design stresses each region’s singularity while fostering an atmosphere of cosmopolitan exchange. We’re meant to feel that the Met is no longer what the writer Ishmael Reed described a half century ago: “the Center for Art Detention.” - The New Yorker
We imagine our choices are free, our selves sovereign, but much of our behavior arises automatically. We are driven by inner conditions, social cues, learned scripts, and neural flows—just as the machine is driven by token prediction and loss minimization. The difference, of course, is that the human brain is plastic. - Hedgehog Review
On average, we spend more than two hours scrolling through such platforms each day. But not all reading is created equal. The mind can skim over the surface of a sentence and swiftly decode its literal meaning. But deep reading — sustained engagement with a longform text — is a distinct endeavor. - Vox
Her unwavering commitment to shoring up the integrity of a book at every stage solidified her legacy as an editor who could turn talent, hers and that of the authors she published, into cultural and literary power. - Slate
To appreciate these works only as visual objects exacerbates the intellectual violence of decontextualization. The Met has responded to this by writing extensive object labels and wall texts, carefully parsed but unflinching even when subjects, such as headhunting, may make some visitors uncomfortable. - Washington Post
Which of America’s founding fathers began writing his memoirs in the early 1770s, a project that remained unfinished when it was posthumously published in 1793? - The New York Times
“I worked for a long time facilitating other people’s creativity, and that was very meaningful and very fulfilling, but I started to miss my own,” Roth, 49, told me during a rehearsal break at a black box studio in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighborhood. - The New York Times
What strikes me most about the list is this: Long-held categories in the movie business are fading, just like they are in the broader culture. - The New York Times
