The Death Of The “Voice Of God”: Traditional Voiceover Narrators Are Disappearing From Documentaries
Starting in the 1990s, traditional documentaries started to be replaced by personality-driven nonfiction films whose directors (e.g., Michael Moore, Werner Herzog) were more than...
Graydon Carter’s Vanity Fair And The Inevitable Fade Of The American Glossy Magazine
"What happens when legacy magazines can no longer rely on their reputation to get readers, let alone party invites? Condé Nast's magazines, especially Carter's...
The Serious Right-Wing Threat To Queer Children’s Literature
"The assumption that 'a gay book' is necessarily a sexualized book, and therefore inappropriate for children, is baked into the language of 'Don’t Say...
Winning A Professional Orchestra Audition Is Very Difficult. Then Comes The Trial Year.
Jeffrey Arlo Brown writes about the tricky, nerve-wracking process that two young trumpeters went through. One passed his trial, the other failed hers —...
The Charming Actor Whose Star Power Has Grown Along With India’s
Why is Shah Rukh Khan so celebrated as he marks 30 years in the Hindi film industry? "He shows us a glimpse of a...
Looted African Treasures Are Returned From Paris To Benin
Mind you, these aren't the Benin Bronzes, which come from what's now southwestern Nigeria. These were taken by French colonial soldiers in the late...
The North Of England Gets Its First Shakespearian Theatre Since Shakespeare’s Own Day
The town of Prescot, a few miles from Liverpool, was once home to the only freestanding Elizabethan theatre outside London. That's the case once...
A Sizeable Roman City, Unknown Until Now, Has Been Discovered Near The Spanish Pyrenees
Archaeologists report that the site, about 20 miles southeast of Pamplona, was "of urban character — the city's name is currently unknown — and...
Authorities Replace Moscow’s Gogol Center, Kirill Serebrennikov’s Old Theater
In 2012, Serebrennikov took over the stultified Gogol Theater, rechristened it the Gogol Center, and made it Moscow's most daring stage, regularly irking the...
Beloved Conductor Bramwell Tovey Dead At 69
Artistic leader of the Rhode Island Philharmonic, BBC Concert Orchestra, and, as of the coming season, the Sarasota Orchestra, Tovey spent widely admired tenures...
A Census Of Every Single Dance Worker In New York City
The project by the nonprofit Dance/NYC "seeks to understand who makes up the dance work force and the social and financial hardships that these...
Kevin Spacey Pleads Not Guilty To Sexual Assault In London; Trial Date Set
"(The actor) appeared at the U.K.'s historic Old Bailey criminal court on Thursday morning, where he pleaded not guilty to all five counts of...
Spotify Bought Heardle, But Some Fans Aren’t On Board
Is this a little like The New York Times buying Wordle? Yes, and the outrage is not dissimilar. For instance: "I lost my game...
The Basketball Superstars Who Learned Ballet And Tap To Better Protect Their Flexibility And...
People described Michael Jordan's basketball moves as "balletic," and sometimes said Kobe Bryant "tap-danced" his way to the net - but those were metaphors....
Emmy Nominees Tell Us We’re Truly Not OK
Perhaps that's not such a surprise, well into our third year of a global pandemic, but the drama nominees show "it is easy to...
Artificial Intelligence Can’t Make Art Without Humans To Provide The Spark
At least, not for now. People using the program DALL-E, which takes human words and makes images in response, "have found that it elevates...
The Refugee Orchestra Of Glasgow
In a heavily refugee and immigrant area of Glasgow, "Musicians in Exile a way of helping to give musician asylum seekers and refugees...
The Six Lines And Five Colors That Changed The Course Of Western Art
Deborah Nicholls-Lee offers a consideration of Piet Monrdian's Composition with Blue, Yellow, Red, Black and Grey (1922). - BBC
Just Say What It Was, Texas
Obviously, "involuntary location" is a nonstarter, but also, "describing someone as a slave does nothing to diminish their humanity. Enslaving someone diminishes their humanity,...
Some Mexican Artists Are Using A New Medium: Piñatas
"A growing number of Latino artists are working to broaden and elevate how Americans view piñatas and (their) history. Some are carving out a...
In The Maw Of The Reality Show Beast: America’s Next Great Author
Will there be a montage of typing fingers? A poetry read-off in Iowa City? A "who navigated the workshop the best" scene in LA?...
At What Point Should We Consider Animals, Or Even AI, “Persons” In A Moral...
If an AI-powered robot exhibited intelligence and capacity to suffer, we might consider granting it moral personhood even though it's not alive. Tapeworms and...
Music Students Who Fled Afghanistan Remake Their School In Portugal
The school's leader, before the Taliban and now in exile: "We can show the world a different Afghanistan. ... We will show how we...
The Waggle-Dancing Of Bees Has Inspired A New Means Of Robot Communication
"This pattern of movements can be used by one forager bee to tell other bees where a food source is located. ... An international...
Social Media Noticed Some Issues With Plagiarism At The Guggenheim Bilbao
Can a painter plagiarize a film? Maybe not in the legal sense - but instead of litigation, the museum and the artists involved in...
