On a windy spring day on 20 October 1973, Queen Elizabeth II officially opened the venue, drawing an estimated 1 million people to the city’s streets. On 13 March 2006, she returned to open a colonnade, calling the Opera House “the symbol of the nation itself.” - The Guardian
Just as streaming isolates and aggregates its users, so it dissolves movies into content. They don’t appear on the platforms so much as disappear into them, flickering in a silent space beyond the reach of conversation. We can watch them whenever we want. We can watch something else. It doesn’t matter. - The New York Times
"An oddly simple new £200m scheme will, for the first time," rather than funding only individual projects, "focus on clusters of heritage sites, including ancient monuments, protected landscapes, museums and an abbey, in specifically targeted, poorer areas of Britain." - The Observer (UK)
"The suspects ... broke into (the city's Museum of East Asian Art) on the night of September 12 and stole nine Chinese porcelain objects dating from the 16th to 19th centuries. … The museum has faced security vulnerabilities this year and a crime spree it has been trying to address." - Artnet
The orchestra, with conductor Daniel Harding filling in for Franz Welser-Möst, was to have performed in Haifa, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem during the last week of October; the engagements have been canceled due to the ongoing attacks by Hamas. Scheduled performances in Austria the previous week will proceed. - Cleveland.com
"Following several years of planning, a pandemic closure, a temporary reopening and a $67.5m makeover, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, officially reopens on 21 October, showcasing reconfigured galleries and event spaces, as well as a cleaned exterior." - CNN (The Art Newspaper)
"Book bans are at record levels, and libraries across the country are facing catastrophic budget cuts. … In a separate line of attack, library collections are being squeezed by draconian licensing deals, and even sued to stop lending digitized books." - The Guardian
"Now breaking is preparing for its biggest international spotlight yet when it bows as an Olympic sport at the Paris Games in 2024. … The new platform has left pioneers and younger breakers to grapple with issues of authenticity that some of hip-hop’s other tenets have already confronted." - The New York Times
"Hollywood writers have voted almost unanimously to approve the contract agreement reached by their union leaders that ended a strike after nearly five months, while actors remain in negotiations to find a way out of their own strike." - AP
The damage is familiar to college faculty across disciplines: writing as a form of Frankfurtian bullshit for which it’s more important to be superficially convincing than rigorous or factually correct; the study of literature as exercise in literary device-hunting, a trick-mirror image of literary formalism from 75 years ago. - The New Republic
Much of the coastline Thoreau walked on is now under water. The land he saw was a sandy “wasteland” without trees,which had been cut down for use in building houses and boats, and making fires. - Boston Globe
We are at a moment of disjunction in the history of reading, driven by a technological shift that already seems to be as consequential as the birth of the printing press, a shift whose magnitude was already present to me 15 years ago when I had my dizzying encounter with my own text. - Tablet
“These platforms are fundamentally rooted in users being able to get value, not just from the platform but from each other. If the platform starts getting in the way of users being able to get value from each other and their connections and community, then that fundamentally eats away the core value of the platform.” - The Atlantic
Discogs is a fairly clunky, definitely old-fashioned website devoted to even older technology: a vestige of an earlier, more idyllic internet that has spent the last decade walking the record-needle-thin line between 2020s algorithmically driven tech monolith and niche unprofitable obscurity. - The Verge
