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Shakespeare Finally Gets A Library Worthy Of His Name

“By opening itself more forthrightly to a wider audience, the library is doing something that Henry Clay Folger could probably never have imagined would be necessary: assert the importance of Shakespeare to public life, from scholars to laymen, passersby and politicians.” - Washington Post

Parisian Arthouse Cinema To Reopen After A Buyout From Previously Evicted Squatters Collective

“Two years after being evicted by Paris police, a collective of students and film-industry professionals returned to the arthouse cinema they had occupied from 2019 to 2022 on Thursday to reinstall the wheels of a 35mm projector.” - The Guardian (UK)

As Wells College Closes, A Beloved Statue Loses Its Head

Minerva, whose feet students had kissed for luck for 150 years, was decapitated by a backhoe. For many, “the accident felt like a final blow. ‘It’s kind of unfolding out before you, just how awful this is, on top of everything else,’ said.” - The New York Times

Octavia Butler’s Birthday Is A Reminder That We Need Black Women’s Visions For The Future

“Octavia E. Butler envisioned with eerie precision: a world of increasing drug addiction and illiteracy, global shifts towards authoritarian populism, vast gaps between the rich and everyone else, and destruction brought on by global warming. Her prophecies, however, ... provided a blueprint for how to fight back.” - Fast Company

The De La Torre Brothers Make Maximalist Art On Both Sides Of The Border

“As a young artist, you’re wondering: Are you a craft person? Are you a conceptual artist? Are you Mexicano? Are you Americano? A Chicano? … At some point, we understood that the least we worried about it, the better.” - The New York Times

Are The Famous Yellow Van Mobile Libraries Being Phased Out In The Scottish Highlands?

A fleet of ten is now seven, of which a majority “carry fewer books and have to be loaded and unloaded. librarian, whose yellow van did not return from the garage in April, said: 'I am worried that the mobile library service will fizzle out and die.’” - The Scotsman

The Growing Importance Of Being Idle

Exhortations toward work as the path to truth, meaning, virtue, and salvation suggest the contemporary valuation of work is—although not universal—more than the legacy of a single cultural tradition. - The Walrus

How MTV’s “The Real World” Pioneered Today’s Reality TV

In many ways, “The Real World” was a great leap forward from the proto-reality ventures of the past. These attempts had ranged from culture-rattling “audience-participation” formats such as “Candid Camera,” which began in the late forties, to the smutty Chuck Barris game shows of the sixties and seventies. - The New Yorker

Why Does The UK Conservative Party Not Want To Talk Arts And Culture?

The Conservatives state that culture and sport lie “at the core of our national and local identities” and pledge to “support our world-leading creative industries”. Yet, arts and culture are squeezed into one short page, alongside sport, media and the nighttime economy. - The Conversation

In Praise Of Ambivalence

Ambivalence can be quicksand, slowly swallowing us whole. But some ambivalence, as lyric poetry taught me, is essential to a life. - Poetry Foundation

Of Balanchine And Graham: Important Lessons About Legacy

If the intertwined fates of Balanchine and Graham tell us anything, it should be that trajectories of dance styles and legacies of choreographers are just as much the products of money and institutional support as of artistic talent. - The Drift

Debating How Babies Learn Language

First, is language acquired by specialized mental processes that are dedicated to this task or learned by general-purpose processes used for a variety of learning tasks? Second, can we project the processes of language acquisition/learning that we observe in the present into the prehistoric past to gain insights about the evolution of language? - LitHub

Were Or Were Not Berthe Morisot And Edouard Manet Lovers?

"(The question) is a matter of wide speculation. New Criterion says they burned their correspondence when she wed. However, Morisot’s letters with her sister show their flirtation was not always a delight. …Morisot rebuffed her mother’s persistent matchmaking, but she obliged Manet’s eventual suggestion that she marry his brother." - Artnet

Boston MFA Director To Step Down

His tenure at the MFA was marked by both successes and challenges, from the overhaul of many galleries, conservation facilities and education programmes, to a racial incident involving a visiting school group and contract negotiations with (and a brief strike by) unionised workers. - The Art Newspaper

Your Off-Broadway Show Is A Hit. Should You Move It To Broadway?

With production costs soaring, is it even worth moving a hit off-Broadway show to Broadway anymore? - TheatreMania

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