Giovanna Sardelli will serve as the company’s artistic director, after a brief turn in the position on an interim basis following the departure of artistic director Tim Bond, who left to take the reins of Oregon Shakespeare Festival. - American Theatre
"(The app's fast creation and launch) has become something of a marvel inside Meta. … Many see its quick rise as a reminder that well-executed product launches might not need all the bureaucratic trappings that a company with some 66,000 employees had grown accustomed to." - MSN (The Washington Post)
As well as overseeing the British Museum during the Covid pandemic, Hartwig Fischer has faced growing controversy over one of the institution’s cultural highlights – the Parthenon marbles, also known as the Elgin marbles – amid calls for the ancient sculptures to be returned to Greece. - The Guardian
"(The show) made perfect sense. Kids are wigged-out surrealists by nature; it takes grown-ups to regiment their impulses into predictable TV formats. ... Maybe a 5-year-old could imagine something like Pee-wee's Playhouse, but only a genius like Reubens could do it as an adult." - The New York Times
The opening ceremony, rather than being in a stadium, will be a parade of boats down the river through the city, and authorities say that about 570 (60%) of the bookstalls must be temporarily moved in order to provide adequate security. The stalls' proprietors are protesting vigorously. - The Guardian
Says the 88-year-old actress, who had already revealed her macular degeneration, "You just deal with it. Get on. It's difficult for me if I have any length of a part. I haven't yet found a way. Because I have so many friends who will teach me the script." - CNN
"Though (the researchers) agree that the illegal trade in antiquities is a matter of serious concern, they argue that the reiteration of and reliance on this unsubstantiated claim only serve to undermine credibility and attempt to quantify the harm of illegal trading in the wrong terms." - Hyperallergic
The classical label's founding father and son, Ted and Simon Perry, insisted for years that they'd allow their recordings to be accessed only by purchase of a physical disc or a download. With the purchase of Hyperion by Universal Music this past March, the change was inevitable. - Classical Music (UK)
They don't exactly have a history of making great decisions: "Hollywood has a history of treating evolving consumer habits first as a threat to theatrical dollars and then as a tool to be co-opted in the pursuit of earning ever-greater profits." - The Atlantic
Hillary Simms, the first woman in the American Brass Quintet, would like to solve that by inspiring more girls and women - which involves ending the "token woman in brass" idea. "We are pitting ourselves against each other, which is the absolute opposite of what we need." - The New York Times
Called 8th Note Press, the proposed entity seems to sit at the intersection of a major publisher and a site like Amazon or Goodreads, but with a social media twist. - The Walrus
There's a model with Stability AI that utilizes a large data set called LAION. It contains 5.8 billion text and image data pairs. And LAION is open for anyone to see, and that's how I found out the entire body of my fine art work to be in those data sets. - NPR
London achieved its musical status in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, adding two new symphony orchestras and drawing a surprised endorsement from Arturo Toscanini that they ranked among the best. Today, star maestros shun London and one of its symphony orchestras came within a matter of days of being abolished. - The Critic
He first developed the Pee-wee character in the 1970s as a member of the Groundlings, then went on to a popular stage show, two hit movies, and a now-legendary Saturday morning TV show that won 22 Emmys. He also made numerous TV and film appearances playing other characters. - Variety
Lawrence’s bristling, inflamed, impertinent language provides a reminder that criticism is not just the work of the brain, but of the gut and the spleen as well. The intellectual refinement of his argument is unthinkable without the churn of instinct and feeling beneath it.
