Yearly Archives: 2021
End Of Times – Identifying The Anthropocene
In the face of such debilitating immensity, we cannot merely shrug and take a selfie. We cannot allow the scale of the crises we...
The Spanglification Of Languages
It is becoming clear that the mixed nature of Spanglish represents a general phenomenon. Among people born in and growing up in neighborhoods like...
Our Ancient Attraction To Glass
In a world filled with the buff, brown and sand hues of more utilitarian Late Bronze Age materials, glass — saturated with blue, purple,...
Nope: Tolkien Estate Blocks Crypto Coin “JRR Token”
The developer said in response that JRR Token was intended to reference “a unique form of digital currency”, rather than the late fantasy author,...
Kafkaesque US Visa System Wreaking Havoc With The Arts
The amount of paperwork required by the USCIS (United States Citizen and Immigration Service), says Nicki Harper, Los Angeles Opera’s director of artistic operations, plus all...
ABT Taps Beyonce Entertainment Exec As Its Next Executive Director
Janet Rollé, general manager of Parkwood Entertainment, Beyoncé’s media and management company, will in January assume the role of chief executive and executive director...
This Virtuoso Horn Player Works The Valves With His Left Foot
Felix Klieser, 30, was born without arms. Even so, he graduated from a German conservatory and made a recording at age 22 that won...
The Real Threat To Academic Freedom Isn’t Cancel Culture, It’s This…
With the privatization and commercialization of higher education, universities are run like businesses, in which a degree becomes a product, students become customers, and...
How The Temple Dancers Of South India Fought Back Against “Moral Reform”
In the 19th century, prompted by the disapproval of Protestant missionaries who wanted Hindu temple dancing banned, some Tamil reformers campaigned for the performers,...
School Protests From A Century Ago Set The Tone For Today’s Controversies
Telling parents you don’t want their kids to have the best possible public schools is never good politics. A full century ago, the most...
Using Medieval Mystery Plays To Revive The Cornish Language
This year was the third full production in modern times of the Ordinalia, a cycle of three 14th-century mystery plays originally written in the...
African Diaspora Music Project Collects 1,200 Symphonies By Black Composers
Louise Toppin is on a mission to recalibrate who, what, and how we program our concert seasons to enable a more equitable representation of music...
The Problem With Piling Prosthetics On Actors To Make Them Look Like The Famous...
"These inspired-by-real-life prosthetics are meant to bring authenticity, but they have a perverse way of achieving the opposite. … Playing people as heavily televised...
True Crime: Manhattan’s Art Theft Police
The unit has impounded more than 3,600 antiquities, valued at some $200 million. They’ve raided art fairs on Park Avenue, and Christie’s in Rockefeller Center. They arrested...
Anderson Cooper Visits Caligula’s Pleasure Garden
A gay silver-fox fantasy come to life? Nope, sorry. In 2006, workers excavating for an underground parking garage found what archaeologists determined was a...
Japan’s Grand Old Man Of Anime Is Making One Last Film
Hayao Miyazaki of Studio Ghibli said in 2013 that he was retiring. Now, aged 80, he's back at work, the film titled How Do...
He Was A Child Laborer, Then A Homeless Migrant. Now He’s A Prizewinning Filmmaker...
P.S. Vinothraj worked in a flower market at age nine and a sweatshop at 14. At 19 he ran to the big city (Chennai)...
How Right-Wingers Tried To Turn Thanksgiving Into A Celebration Of Free Enterprise And Rejection...
This was not some scheme dreamed up by Fox News or Rush Limbaugh or even the Cato Institute: this particular intellectual endeavor goes all...
This AI Algorithm Could Help Us Figure Out Shakespeare
No, not his actual identity, we're afraid. But, if not the definitively correct version of the text of a play or poem, at least...
Italy’s “Netflix For The Arts” Is Now Open Across Europe
"ITsART … was rolled out across 26 European countries on Tuesday, with plans to expand into the U.S. and China next year. … Prices...
Britain’s Collins Dictionary Declares “NFT” Word Of The Year 2021
It's hard to believe now, but it was only this March that Beeple sold his original non-fungible token artwork for $69 million, setting off...
Study: Disparities In The Ways Theatres Are Funded
“Almost no theatre of color has a budget over $3 million. Until we reach $5 million, we don’t get access to commission funding or...
Why Did An Australian TV Network Pay $1 Million For An Interview With Adele?
The answer is we got there via a thousand cuts, incremental concessions that have contributed to, and reinforced, the idea that mainstream media is...
400,000 Books Burned In Bookstore Fire
A book signed by Queen Victoria and a first edition of the Radio Times from 1923 were lost when the fire broke out at...
Cool – A Brain Scan! But What Does It Mean?
Beyond grasping the stakes of these statistical debates, then, public engagement with neuroscience would be less prone to overreaches of ‘neurorealism’ if equipped with...