Actors With Down Syndrome Are Finally Getting Mainstream Roles
Shows like Who Do You Think I Am have "this effect of normalizing disability and showing us that people with Down syndrome are...
Amazon’s Lord Of The Rings Series Has A Diverse Cast, Which Is Freaking Out...
Says expert Dr. Ebony Thomas, "People are used to seeing fantasies and fairytales as all-white, particularly in faux-medieval or magical-medieval settings. ... We’re taking...
Pandemic Fiction Is Booming Right Now, But Have Novelists Had Time To Truly Contemplate...
"Some writers worry a pandemic plot might drive away readers who want to escape our grim reality, but ignoring it might feel jarringly unrealistic....
Netflix Tries Its Hand At Original Short Films
The streamer is always on the hunt for new talent, so an emerging director showcase is logical. One director: "I jokingly say it’s like...
The Joy And Promise Of Used Cookbook Sections
"When you inherit someone else's cookbook, there are stories contained within it beyond the author's words; there are stained pages, dog-eared recipes and notes...
Why Writers Switch From Fiction To Nonfiction, And Back Again
Events can overtake the imagination - and then after some decades, it's time to re-imagine experience and reaction. Basically, "this is how life is;...
Add Victorian Science And Victorian Bigotry, And You Get Dracula
Witness a folk remedy popular in the 19th century: "If the heart of a corpse contained blood, it was believed that it showed it...
What’s Going To Happen At The Oscars?
Only pundits know, and even they don't really know much. "The Academy declared 276 films from 2021 as Oscar-eligible, and much of the responsibility...
A Re-Delayed Reopening On Broadway
The musical Mrs. Doubtfire closed temporarily because of Omicron and will not reopen until April. "The hiatus left the show’s cast, crew and musicians...
Prison Choirs Unite To Sing Beethoven’s Fidelio, An Opera About Unjust Imprisonment
In this production, via recordings, "singers from six prison musical groups — a mix of over 100 men and women who are incarcerated as...
How The French Rococo Inspired Disney’s Look
That's right, if you don't like the look of Disney princesses, not to mention the talking clocks and wardrobes, you can blame Jean-Honoré Fragonard,...
Building Communities People Really Want
Talk less; play more. When people used their hands to build a model Los Angeles, they made "bioswales, pedestrian zones, unearthing creeks long covered...
The Museum Within A Museum, Bringing A Long-Held Dream To Reality In Brazil
The artist Abdas do Nascimiento dreamed of a museum for Black art in his country, but "after years in exile during a military dictatorship...
Regular Streaming Is Crowded, And Then There’s The Fight For Anime
On the good side, "you no longer have to shell out hundreds of dollars for a VHS set or rely on pirated versions of...
An Argument About The Loan Of A Congolese Statue Escalates With The Sale Of...
A Virginia museum has loaned the statue to Europe but won't loan it to a gallery in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, so...
How Does A Film Studies Prof Teach Last Year’s Complex, Not Oscar-Nominated, Palme D’Or...
Titane is not easy to parse. "Julia Ducournau is willing to explore the strange, to show us our own bodies, soft and hard, that...
What ‘Slave Play’ Means To The Actors In The Play
Antoinette Crow-Legacy says the Jeremy O. Harris play "gives me freedom to be messy and complicated and blur the lines between right and wrong."...
To Find Out How Much Medieval Literature We Lost, We’re Turning To Wildlife
A wildlife tracking method, specifically: "Mike Kestemont, computational text researcher at the University of Antwerp, and his colleagues used the 'unseen species' model, which...
There’s A Boom In Horror Right Now, Especially By Women Directors
What's that about? "There’s a great artistic freedom in horror that’s perhaps not available in other genres. Obviously, in a drama, you can’t have...
The Uncanny Valley Has Turned Into The Trustworthy Town Square
It's a bit alarming. "Farid and Nightingale asked participants to look at a selection of them and sort them into real and fake. Participants...
Playwright Sanaz Toossi On Language, Representation, And The Comic Potential Of Bleeding Onto The...
Toossi wrote one her plays going up in New York in white-hot anger after the Trump Muslim travel ban. "If all that ever gets...
What A Tennessee Ban On ‘Maus’ Means For The Artists Inspired By The Book
"Maus galvanized a generation of comics creators to fill bookshelves with graphic narratives about the Holocaust and its inheritance and inspired a community of thinkers...
Mark Morris Says No, Artists Are Definitely Not OK Right Now
Morris, on dance rehearsal: "It was horrible. ... Everyone was freaked out. You’re scared being next to each other, and you’re scared to talk...
The Painful Experience Of An In-Person Film Festival
In Berlin, during the many nasal swab tests, "I look up and to the right as the technician inserts the little wand, either affecting...
Why Hasn’t The City Of Los Angeles Reopened Its Arts Spaces?
In a "totally Kafkaesque" situation, one artist's show ran without the public ever being able to see it. "All facilities overseen by the city’s...
