Salsa In Syria: Social Dancing Classes Offer Damascans A Brief Escape From The Stresses...
"For (the) students, ballroom dancing is a form of release, finding rhythm in music away from their country's many social and economic pressures. For...
Cleaning Up Messy Ideas Results In Stale Monocultures
It seems to me that the one indisputable thing we can say about our current illiberalisms, of the left and the right: All illiberalisms are...
The Costa Book Awards Really Did Make A Difference (A Eulogy)
"The USP of the Whitbreads, which morphed into the Costas 14 years before they were abruptly scrapped this month, was that they didn't buy...
Streaming On Edge: Companies Crack Down On Password Sharing
It's "an industry falling out of sync with how people use its products. It’s no longer just a cheaper, ad-free alternative to cable, but...
For The First Time, An LGBTQ Studies Scholar Wins The $500,000 Kluge Humanities Prize
The honoree is historian George Chauncey, best known for the multi-award-winning Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of the Gay Male...
Smithsonian Picks Four Potential Sites For New Women’s History and Latino Museums
The historical Arts and Industries Building, on Jefferson Drive SW next to the Smithsonian administration building known as the Castle, is the sole site...
The L.A. Times Sets Up Its Own “Meme Team” (And You Won’t See Its...
It's called The 404, and "video — especially on TikTok — (will) be the first priority. Other areas of concentration will be images (think:...
What COVID School Closures Really Cost Students
Conventional accounts of the effect of school closures focus on the shift from in-person to online teaching and the academic losses that resulted. This familiar...
What’s Behind The Closing Notices For Long-Running Broadway Musicals?
Come From Away, Dear Evan Hansen, and Tina did solid business before the pandemic. Yet with tourism to New York City still down, they've...
The Bind Facing Black American Playwrights: How Do You Offer Deliverance, Or Even Hope,...
"How can these stories end? What does deliverance look like in a world in which the odds are stacked against these Black characters, and...
The San Antonio Symphony Is Dead, But Its Musicians Will Keep Giving Concerts
"After playing three concerts this spring, the Musicians of the San Antonio Symphony is making plans for a fall season in which it hopes...
Yes, San Antonio Can Have The Professional Symphony Orchestra It Deserves
"Not only is a reborn symphony possible, but ... it is essential to the quality of life in San Antonio, and preservation of the...
Despite The Symphony’s Death, There’s A Thriving Chamber Orchestra In San Antonio
"Unlike the symphony, it's a young institution. Unlike the symphony, it has diversity and inclusiveness deep in its DNA. ... Its performing artists hail...
Librarians Find A Dürer Just Sitting There In An Old Book On Their Shelves
"During a recent inventory audit, researchers at the Oldenburg State Library (in Germany) found on the title page of the book (the) small drawing....
James Rado, Co-Creator Of The Musical “Hair”, Dead At 90
Contrary to popular lore, Rado and collaborator (and then-lover) Gerome Ragni weren't out-of-work actors writing themselves roles (they played Claude and Berger), they were...
After 47 Books, John Grisham On Writing, Hollywood, And Storytelling
"I can’t get a fraction of that today. You can say, Well, we choked the golden goose, but all those films made money. Then...
Shall I Compare Thee To A Summer’s Algorithm?
We Googled the first line, expecting it to be an existing Philip Larkin poem, but we couldn’t find it on the Internet. It was...
What The Toppling Of Public Monuments Says About Our Time
While the recent destruction of statues in the contemporary West ostensibly relates to a racial reckoning, it nonetheless stands in a long lineage of...
Cornell West: America’s Essential Philosophy Is Pragmatism
Pragmatism emerged in the US in the late 1800s as a response to the Enlightenment push for absolute truth. Pragmatists — like William James...
The Purpose Of Comedy?
Comedy is a social corrective exposing the gap between what is (injustice, poverty, environmental disaster) and what some think it ought to be (fairness, equal opportunity, gentle breezes)....
The Obamas Move Their Media Company From Spotify To Audible
The agreement between the company, called Higher Ground, and Spotify was not renewed because of disagreements over both content and distribution. The new deal...
How Hollywood Turned Graham Greene’s Novel “The Quiet American” Upside-Down
"Greene usually liked to see his novels adapted, but not this time. What Greene was trying to say about American ignorance and arrogance in...
The Meteoric Rise Of Art Star Anna Weyant
It has been a rocket-fueled rise to the top of the contemporary art world for Ms. Weyant—and far from her unassuming start in Calgary,...
The Long Effort To Decipher Linear A And Linear B, Two Of The World’s...
The scripts come from the Bronze Age civilization on Crete during the 2nd millennium BCE. It was a long and somewhat tricky process to...
Apocalypse Not: The American Mall Cannot Be Killed
Since the 1978 movie Dawn of the Dead, we have been using “the apocalyptic scale, the language and imagery of civilizational collapse” to describe malls....
