“Benaroya Hall, the longtime home of the Seattle Symphony …, will close for six weeks beginning in July for the final phase of a $20 million renovation to the building’s entrances, lobby and public-facing spaces, the Symphony announced Thursday. (No performance spaces are part of the renovation plans.)” - The Seattle Times
“The drawings picture the East Wing volume extending well into the White House lawn. At roughly 90,000 square feet, its footprint is more than twice the size of the previous East Wing building, which is now fully demolished. … The documentation includes site plans, building plans, elevations, landscape drawings and renders.” - Dezeen
“The renovations are more modest in scale and scope than what President Trump has publicly outlined for the revamped arts center, and it is unclear whether or not these plans are the extent of the intended renovations.” - NPR
Nike Imoru said that for last year’s staging of The Odyssey, she was told to get cornrows but was not provided with a competent stylist as Equity’s contract requires — and that the backstage worker who did the work instead left her with permanent damage, including the loss of most of her hair. - CBS News
The company’s general manager — who drew widespread praise in his first few years but has recently come under fire as the Met has suffered financially — will depart when his current contract expires at the end of the 2029-30 season. - OperaWire
During its 2026-27 season, the Metropolitan Opera will present only 17 productions, the fewest in a full season since (at least) the company moved into its Lincoln Center home in 1966. More than a third of the total number of performances will be of either Aïda, La Bohème, or Tosca. - AP
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)
