The company was to open its season this weekend with Kamala Shankaran’s The Many Deaths of Laila Starr. Orchestra musicians say it’s a lockout; management says it can’t risk what happened at San Francisco Opera, with opening night cancelled minutes before curtain time when the orchestra declared a strike. - The Minnesota Star Tribune (MSN)
She was one of the Metropolitan Opera’s favorite light lyric sopranos in the 1970s and ‘80s, known especially for her Sophie in Der Rosenkavalier, Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro, and Adina in L’elisir d’amore opposite Pavarotti as Nemorino. - OperaWire
“Since 2020, the (Science of Scare Project) has evaluated horror movies’ physiological effects on viewers by monitoring their heart rate and heart rate variability … as they watch a curated selection of English-language horror films considered among the most frightening.” And the winner is … ? - HuffPost
Why are humans so driven to make things? In our age of A.I. slop, the V. & A.’s devotion to physical objects is a tonic. And if two new buildings seem like overkill, think of all those data centers. - The New Yorker
La Stampa, a nationally- and regionally-focused outlet headquartered in Turin, is opening La Stampa USA as an online publication aimed at an Italian-American readership. The newsroom currently has five employees in New York and two in Washington DC and plans to hire contributors around the country. - Press Gazette (UK)
Rather than cycling through distinct eras sequentially as Laver predicted, social media feeds flatten time entirely. Decades of vintage subcultures and instant micro-aesthetics are collapsed into the same endless scroll, allowing a 1990s minimalist silhouette to coexist alongside a week-old “whimsymaxxing” viral trend. - The Conversation
Requests that were once directly stated as imperatives were now couched with indirectness as merely suggestions or questions: “Shut the window,” became “Could you please shut the window?” And, in addition to saying “thanks,” responding with an acknowledgment of that thanks, such as “you’re welcome,” became routine. - Time
The 45-year-old actor blames his upbringing for mispronunciations, like calling a “library” a “liberry.” Fans seized on the gaffe. “I was like, you know what? Touché,” Palmini said. “Even though you said you want to burn the book now because I said ‘liberry,’ I get it. Truly. Noted. ‘Library’ it is.” - The Wall Street Journal (MSN)
Oliver Wainwright: “It is a tour de force of how to do a lot with a little. It reads like a collage of its context: a shed clad with corrugated fibre-cement sheeting, rising from graffiti-covered warehouse walls on one side and framed by a new brick gable end on the other.” - The Guardian
The Eames Institute of Infinite Curiosity, the nonprofit established by the family of design and art pioneers Ray and Charles Eames, is set to file a master plan with the city of Novato that will transform the 85.5-acre site into a global design museum, attracting some 200,000 visitors a year. - San Francisco Chronicle (MSN)
After less than two weeks in theaters, it’s already one of the highest-grossing documentaries of all time and, as it expanded into thousands of domestic theaters in its second weekend, came second only to a major studio comic-book movie. - Slate
For an actor to remain insured through SAG-AFTRA, they must typically make a minimum amount of money from on-screen work and residuals. Leveraging his Instagram following of almost 750,000, Cheyenne Jackson began posting headshots of performers, their biographies and how many dollars away each was from crossing that threshold, which this year is $28,090. - The New York Times
Well, for a start, they have negotiable rates, along with the pension and health contributions and the protected working conditions (such as guaranteed breaks) that dancers working in film and TV have had since 1992. - Dance Magazine
Multiple bestselling Big Five authors say they’ve gone to “war” with their publishers over AI and are considering abandoning traditional publishing altogether. - Wired
To be online, many now admit, is to be endlessly manipulated and exploited. In December, Oxford University Press declared rage bait to be the word of the year, noting that use of the term had tripled over the previous 12 months. - Wired
