“We did this workshop,” Foley told me. “And he came to see it, and . . . he did not like it. It was a really awful experience, because everybody was, like, What did Sondheim think? What did Sondheim think? And . . . I had to lie. - The New Yorker
She first came to notice in contemporary classical circles in the 1980s with atmospheric modernist music which frequently incorporated electronics; she achieved stardom with the 2000 opera L'Amour de loin, once called "the first great opera of the 21st century." She had kept secret a 2021 diagnosis of brain cancer. - BBC
Most of us want to live as long as possible but would like to avoid the deterioration of aging. So it’s only natural that antiaging remedies abound. Sadly, most of them are just false hope, hype, and snake oil. - Skeptical Inquirer
At least five GitaGPTs have sprung up between January and March this year, with more on the way. Experts have warned that chatbots being allowed to play god might have unintended, and dangerous, consequences. - Rest of World
The short story has, from the beginning, been a thoroughly modern form: Originally published in newspapers and magazines and consumed on railroads and omnibuses, short stories have been ideal material for people who do not have the time or patience for a novel. - Hedgehog Review
"The artisan Nakamura Mitsue employs her four decades of experience as she cuts, carves and paints, gradually forging an eerily lifelike human face from a single block of wood." (video) - Aeon
Succession comes by its theater DNA honestly. A number of its writers are working playwrights, with impressive produced work under their belts, and executive producer Frank Rich was the New York Times’s chief theater critic from 1980 to 1993. - Vox
Rafael Viñoly was at a dinner party with Martha Argerich and Daniel Barenboim, who complained about the challenges of a standard keyboard for someone with a small reach. Viñoly asked if a curved keyboard would be better; they said, "sure, try it" — so he designed one. - MSN (The Philadelphia Inquirer)
It’s ridiculous that we’ve built a system that overvalues the sort of technocratic skills these universities cultivate and undervalues the social and moral skills that any healthy society should value more. - The New York Times
"The manuscripts were copied by cleric Richard Heege, a tutor to the Sherbrooke family, part of the Derbyshire gentry. … Dr. Wade concluded that Heege copied the text of an unknown minstrel who performed near the Derbyshire-Nottinghamshire border in about 1480." - BBC
Republicans on the Newtown Board of Education sought to have Flamer by Mike Curato and Blankets by Craig Thompson removed from the local high school library as if Connecticut was some benighted red state. - The Daily Beast
In a letter last month on the institution's 60th anniversary, the Chinese president said NAMOC should "be persistent in upholding a politically correct direction, putting people first, and practicing the core values of socialism … in order to … promote self-strengthening of cultural confidence, and new glory of the socialist culture." - Artnet
The Oregon Shakespeare Festival announced Thursday that former tech executive Tyler Hokama has been appointed the company’s interim executive director, and at the same time announced a new fundraising goal to complete its 2023 season. - The Oregonian
It certainly started as a collaboration, with the collective KIRAC making a documentary about France's reigning literary provocateur (age 67 and married, as if that mattered) going to Amsterdam to get laid. By now it's two court cases and a public appearance in a cockroach suit. - The New York Times
"What happened at (Gonville & Caius) demonstrates the collision between two different worldviews: one that sees research into the history of slavery as a routine, but vital, academic exercise; and another that sees it as an overtly biased undertaking and a threat to the way historical knowledge is produced." - The Guardian
