Because people keep knocking it off — most recently, this past weekend, when police found the four-inch marble fragment from the left tusk on the pavement nearby. - AP
How a cross between rock climbing, rappelling, circus aerobatics and contemporary dance turned into a performing art of its own. - The Mercury News (San Jose)
Outsiders’ power over the story of the Maya is written into the people’s very name. After their arrival in the early 1500s, the Spanish named local populations “Maya” after the ruined city of Mayapán in present day Mexico. Yet the Maya never saw themselves as one people and were never governed under one empire. - The Guardian
Bindery Books, a startup founded by publishing veterans, uses social media book influencers as acquiring editors to champion underrepresented authors and build engaged reader communities. - Los Angeles Times
George R.R. Martin, author of the series of novels at the heart of the franchise, says that the RSC was the ‘obvious choice’ to produce the play — Game of Thrones: The Mad King — because Shakespeare had been a constant source of inspiration to him. - The Guardian
“So many children are now falling behind,” Dent said. “The vocabulary gap is getting bigger and there is a real perception that vocabulary development is suffering and that impacts on learning.” - The Guardian
“The V&A has acquired a reconstructed early webpage and the first video ever uploaded to the platform by co-founder Jawed Karim,” a V&A spokesperson said. - CNN
The rise of chatbot marketing is happening as A.I. tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini hit mass adoption. OpenAI has said that 800 million people use ChatGPT weekly, while Google says its Gemini chatbot has more than 750 million monthly users. - The New York Times
Graduates of the country’s El Sistema program can be found on concert stages and in top-flight orchestras all over the world; conductor Giancarlo Guerrero suggests that perhaps musicians are Venezuela’s top export. But with political uncertainty there and Trump’s visa restrictions in the US, will the talent keep pouring out? - WBEZ (Chicago)
The first and only museum dedicated to the US constitution has been plunged into turmoil over the sudden departure of its president, a legal scholar widely respected for his commitment to non-partisanship. - The Guardian
In the first third of 2026, we’ll see 11 plays and only six musicals on Broadway. And many of the musicals that will open share a certain downtown sensibility instead of, say, a stately Sondheim import or Disneyfied cheer. - The New York Times
Afghanistan’s National Television, a broadcaster controlled by the Taliban, reported on Tuesday that morality police in Parwan had gathered the instruments over the past year from the provincial centre and surrounding districts. The report said a Taliban committee later set the items on fire. - Afghanistan International
“To begin with, a Book of the Dead is a misnomer, applied by 19th-century Western scholars. A more accurate translation of the title would be ‘Spells of Coming Forth by Day.’ Unlike obituaries, they aren’t biographies. They aren’t even books. And, they’re not of the dead. They’re for the dead.” - The New York Times
“Department M, a production company founded two years ago by Mike Larocca and Michael Schaefer, is in talks to acquire a significant stake in Neon, the Oscar-winning studio behind Parasite and Anora.” - Variety
On top of a career designing sets and lights for more than 50 Broadway productions and over 30 George Balanchine ballets, he became, in 1967, the founding artistic director of the National Theater of the Deaf, which combined spoken dialogue and sign language to create, in effect, a new genre. - The New York Times
