Yearly Archives: 2021
For The First Time In Over A Decade, The Paris Opera Ballet Has A...
Le Rouge et Le Noir, based on Stendhal's novel, has choreography, costumes and set design by Pierre Lacotte, 89, who's been with the company...
For The Second Year, College Enrollment Falls
Undergraduate enrollment across the board fell by 3.2 percent this fall, echoing last fall’s 3.4 percent decline. Since fall 2019, undergraduate enrollments have dropped by 6.5 percent....
The Real Skill Behind A Great Magician’s Show (It’s Not How The Tricks Are...
Joshua Jay: "In my craft, unlike filmmaking, I have to find the intersection of suspense and surprise, and that's difficult. In a two-hour movie,...
Remembering Conductor Michael Morgan And His Impact On The Bay Area
The scope of Morgan’s outreach was both personal and institutional, both public and below the radar. He made the Oakland Symphony a meeting ground...
How’s This For Brave? A Complete Wagner ‘Ring’ Cycle, Set In Samoa, Performed With...
That's exactly what the London-based collective Gafa, run by Samoan-British singers, is doing for the next four Saturdays, in a costumed concert staging. The...
Abdulrazak Gurnah Won The Nobel Prize For Literature. Why Wasn’t His 2020 Book Published...
“Afterlives,” which explores the brutality of Germany’s colonial rule in East Africa, came out in Britain in September 2020 and was hailed as a masterpiece....
Urdu And Hindi Are Basically The Same Language. Why Do Hindu Nationalists So Violently...
It's not as simple as Urdu=Muslim and Hindi=Hindu. Not only did the two languages — which share all their grammar and most of their...
Haunted House Attractions Are Immersive Theater. What Distinguishes The Good Ones?
Really, it's the same things as with any other theater: good actors with good material matter more than special effects. As Halloween approaches, Alexis...
Meet The Great-Grandson Of One Of The Benin Bronze Sculptors, Who Still Runs A...
Monday Aigbe has a statue of his ancestor in the middle of his complex, where craftsmen continue to cast bronzes and carve sculptures and...
This Is The Second Most Popular Talk Radio Show In America (You May Never...
"Like much of talk radio, The Ramsey Show sits in a murky zone between journalism and entertainment. It is not quite a news program,...
In Chicago, Nearly Half Of Small Performing Arts Orgs Can’t Or Won’t Reopen Yet
The Donnelly Foundation surveyed 91 of its grantees (organizations with budgets under $1 million) and found that 44% of them either can't return to...
After A Century, The Last Tsar’s Palace Is Restored And Reopened
The Alexander Palace in Tsarskoe Selo near St. Petersburg, where Nicholas, Alexandra, and their five children lived before being shipped off to Yekaterinburg to...
So It Continues: Hong Kong Passes China-Style Film Censorship Law
The legislation bans any film deemed against the national security interests of the People's Republic of China, with violators subject to three years in...
The Real Questions For Movie-Makers After The Santa Fe Accident
I start to question things I should’ve been questioning harder, earlier. Do we need this stuff? Why does recreational screen slaughter remain America’s number...
Twitter Has 211 Million Users, Up 13 Percent
Revenue of $1.28 billion was up 37%. Twitter sales are advertising based and saw U.S, total sales up 45% to $742 million and ad...
Why Has Gender Become So Contentious Worldwide?
The attacks on so-called “gender ideology” have grown in recent years throughout the world, dominating public debate stoked by electronic networks and backed by...
You’re Writing A Book. How Do Your Choose Names For Your Characters?
When it comes to writing, naming is one of the more fun problems of fiction, perhaps especially speculative fiction, where names can be as...
Museum Shows With A Moral Message? Yes, Actually
So it’s an exhibition with a pointed moral agenda. But it’s not preachy or obvious. It’s smart, it’s thoughtful, and it’s visually compelling. -...
Do Cars Belong In Art Museums?
There's a "danger of treating the car as an art object in itself. It may be art, but it’s a very different kind of...
Looking To A Play About An Earlier Epidemic To Answer A Key Question About...
In Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart, Lily Janiak finds some lines that shed bright, painful light on why some people would refuse a vaccine...
How Conspiracy Theories Work
“In folklore, we have this law of self-correction. So if something doesn’t quite fit, you go back to the way you heard it from...
Why Do People Like Blood And Gore In Their Movies And TV So Much?
There are several reasons, say researchers, most of which boil down to "Hey, adrenaline is fun when you're not actually in danger!" And watching...
Is The Sitcom Dead?
There are a few reasons why the sitcom seems, if not comprehensively deceased, then at least less responsive than it has ever been. - The...
Another Set Of Looted Treasures Is Being Repatriated To Africa (And These Are Actually...
You know about the Benin Bronzes, looted by the British from what's now Nigeria and some of which are being returned there. These objects,...
How The Russian Version Of “Married… With Children” Became A Cultural Phenomenon
So successful was the sitcom that they ended up running out of American scripts to adapt and they soon began writing their own. All told, Schastlivy Vmeste ran...