“(He's) the man who has brought frolicking gorillas, breaching whales and tiny poisonous frogs into living rooms around the world for more than 70 years. … Attenborough has illuminated the beauty, ferocity and sometimes downright weirdness of nature in a hushed melodic voice that conveys his own awe at what he is witnessing.” - AP
“While early music enjoyed a strong following (since) the 1970s, historical dance needed help catching up — and the New York Baroque Dance Co., founded in 1976 by Catherine Turocy and Ann Jacoby, was seminal in jump-starting research, performance styles, and popularity.” - Early Music America
Amid the current cultural backlash against progressive ideas, today’s debate on consciousness reflects our human fears of belonging to the same family as inanimate matter and losing our dear, transcendent souls. - Noema
Gawker, which shut down 10 years ago this August, was guilty of lapses in judgment — former staffers interviewed for this story admit as much. It could be withering, puerile and gratuitously nasty. But, at its best, it rebelled against media piety and the growing, often indiscriminate power of the digital world. - The Hollywood Reporter
“The hip current events platform targeted at Millennials, which sought to be ‘The Economist for young people’ during the decade (2014-2023), is now being resuscitated by company founder Shane Smith, both as a social-platform-first outlet for his podcast and news reports and as a brand partnership vehicle.” - The Hollywood Reporter
The New York-based media company released its first-quarter earnings report Wednesday, which included a $2.9-billion loss. That amount includes $1.3 billion in restructuring expenses, including updated valuations for Warner's declining linear cable television networks. - Los Angeles Times (Yahoo)
“Without this much needed arts tax reform, including indexing it to inflation, we risk losing the very institutions that make Portland vibrant, and we also risk losing the next generation of arts lovers by failing to sustain arts education in our schools.” - KATU
A little over a year later, after the Department of Government Efficiency eliminated more than half of the NEH staff and tried to terminate 97 percent of its grants, Trump fired all but four members of the 26-person advisory board, called the National Council on the Humanities. - Chronicle of Higher Education
From the original, nineteenth-century form popularized by Balzac, Zola, and Stendhal to the “lyrical” variant of today, the verisimilitude that realism pursues—not just lifelikeness, but worldlikeness—is meant to convince us the novel is, for want of a better term, natural. - Boston Review
“Since taking power in 2010, Orbán and his Fidesz party reshaped the country’s media to promote themselves and demonise their opponents, sending press freedom rankings plunging and leaving swathes of the country living in an alternative reality.” Soon after last month’s election, Magyar vowed to suspend and reform state media he compared to North Korea’s. - The Guardian
His way of turning chaos into clockwork, of shifting the act of watching ballet to an out-of-body experience, might do a number on a choreographer trying to make a full-scale classical dance at City Ballet. Still, why hasn’t anyone tried? Why don’t choreographers make huge classical ballets anymore? - The New York Times
Some experts say Substack’s rise fits into a longer arc in publishing, one shaped by the early wave of self-publishing tools like Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing and Smashwords in the late aughts. Those platforms opened the door for self-published authors, but didn’t solve the marketing problem. - Fast Company
PEN America’s report released Thursday called “Facts & Fiction: Stories Stripped Away by Book Bans” found that 3,743 unique titles were removed from school libraries and classrooms between July 2024 and June 2025. This included 1,102 nonfiction titles. - The Hill
“PEN America analysed the 3,743 unique titles removed from school libraries and classrooms in the (2024-25) July to June period and found that over 1,100 or 29% were non-fiction, more than double the year prior. The most common theme in the banned non-fiction books was activism and social movements.” - The Guardian
“The Trump administration’s cancellation of more than $100 million in humanities grants to scholars, writers, research groups and other organizations was unconstitutional, and the Department of Government Efficiency had no authority to end the funding, a federal judge in New York ruled on Thursday.” - AP
