Worry Escalates Over Fate Of The English National Opera

For the past month, the fate of the E.N.O. has made headlines here. Musicians, critics and politicians have been arguing over whether the decision...

How Twitter Changes Our Sense Of Time

The concept of entrainment points to the ways in which our experience of time can be affected by so much more than the number...

Met Opera Scrambles To Replace Its Website, Ticket Portal

The attack has wreaked havoc as the Met prepares for a string of holiday productions. At this time of year, the company’s ticketing systems...

Study: How Reading Changed During The Pandemic

While many commentators at the beginning of the pandemic endorsed reading as a straightforward way to relax, our readers showed that the practice morphed and took...

Can We Transcend Today’s Humanness To Be Something More?

We can imagine “heights of flourishing” that tower above the life we know now, but human minds and bodies are capable of climbing only...

Our Five Senses (Wait, We Actually Have Seven?)

Beyond the traditional five senses, neuroscientific research also examines proprioception (sensing your muscles, their location, and their movements) and the vestibular system, which regulates the sense of orientation...

Do We Have Free Will? (And How Does It Shape Our Identity?)

Human beings may make choices that are not predictable or even completely determined. The hard question of free will is whether, at the time...

How Did The Things Around Us Get So Ugly?

It occurs to us, strolling past a pair of broken BuzzFeed Shopping–approved AirPods, that the new ugliness has beset us from both above and...

Being An Old Artist (It Can Be Liberating)

Many artists have found that old age, for all its physical and emotional burdens, can be a moment of creative liberation comparable to, even...

Czech Museum Returns Beethoven Manuscript To Heirs

The Moravian Museum in the Czech city of Brno has had the original manuscript for the fourth movement of Beethoven's String Quartet n B-flat...

Battlefield Memories From The Culture Wars Of The 1990s

John Killacky, performing arts curator at the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis 1988-1996, presented much of the work attacked by right-wingers: Holly Hughes, Ron...

ChatGPT Elevates Interactive Artificial Intelligence To A New Level

ChatGPT feels different. Smarter. Weirder. More flexible. It can write jokes (some of which are actually funny), working computer code and college-level essays. It can also guess at medical diagnoses, create...

Dance At The World Cup: Brazilian Soccer Would Not Be What It Is Without...

It's not just the dances the players do to celebrate: samba steps have worked their way into the Brazilians' game technique. For instance, says...

Does This New Artificial Intelligence ChatGPT Spell The End Of The Student Essay?

The essay, in particular the undergraduate essay, has been the center of humanistic pedagogy for generations. It is the way we teach children how...

What Learning To Read Braille Did To My Brain

"'Surely the part of my brain that I used to read with shut down at the same time as my sight?' asks Red Szell...

Denver Post’s Investigative Series Into A System That Enables Looted Art Trade

The series highlights the cozy nature between curators, scholars, museums and dealers — and how incentives align to allow the dirty world of the...

The Lit Critics Who Really, Really Hated “The Waste Land”

"Reviews were often pitched at nonspecialist general interest readers. ... To come to Eliot's poem with a few platitudes about decency, intelligibility, and ease...

Penguin Random House CEO Steps Down After Failed Takeover

As the head of the largest publisher in the country, Markus Dohle oversaw the attempted acquisition of Simon & Schuster, a deal the Justice...

Ukrainian Soldiers’ Dance Videos Are The Latest Social Media Hit

"One comment with over 1,800 likes said, 'Damn! These Ukrainians do have a sense of humor. I'm rooting for you,' while a comment with...

You Think It’s Taken A Long Time For Hollywood To Pay Women And Men...

Priyanka Chopra says that in a 20-year career, "I've never had pay parity in Bollywood. I would get paid about 10% of the salary...

George Newall, Last Surviving Co-Creator Of “Schoolhouse Rock,” Is Dead At 88

He was creative director of an ad agency when the boss complained that his sons could remember rock lyrics but not multiplication tables and...

This Director May Have Figured Out How To Rescue Sondheim’s Most Notorious Flop

For four decades, the consensus has been that — despite some excellent songs, and despite repeated adjustments during revivals — there's just no way...

The Blue Man Group Has Been Running For 30 Years — Longer Than “Phantom...

Indeed, Phantom is ending its long Broadway run this spring, but the Blue Man Group (granted, in a smaller house) just keeps on —...

BBC’s Boss Predicts It Will Be Online-Only In Ten Years

Director general Tim Davie: "Imagine a world that is internet-only, where broadcast TV and radio are being switched off and choice is infinite. A...

English National Opera May Keep Performing In London If It Makes Its Base Somewhere...

Arts Council England head Darren Henley told a parliamentary committee, "We are saying we would like to see an organisation with a base outside...