"The claim centers on that 1936 sale, which ... took place three months after the family had left Berlin for Vienna. The Nazis restricted what departing Jews could take with them, and according to Schnabel’s research, the family was forced to pay the 'Reich flight tax.'" - The New York Times
"Stars of a certain caliber demanded certain privileges in their contracts: quote approval, cover approval, cover-or-nothing. Vanity Fair wished to appear to grant these privileges but really had no intention of doing so." - LitHub
"Auctioneers estimated it would sell for over $1m, but on Thursday a Star Wars lightsaber used by Darth Vader in the famous 'I am your father' scene from The Empire Strikes Back ended up selling for nearly $5m." - The Guardian (UK)
When Daniel Singer died in September, his and his co-writers' Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) had inspired 45 years of "reverently irreverent send-ups of beloved and/or sacred subjects performed by small casts of fast, funny, and physical performers playing multiple roles." - American Theatre
"Anything that forces you to do a bunch of therapy and think deeply and read a bunch of books and travel — anything that throws you off is actually potentially very, very good for you." - The New York Times
"'We won’t really be elevating the moral status of A.I.' ... All we’ll be doing is reducing living human beings 'to the equivalent of a box of equations.'" - The New York Times
CanCon, or Canadian content, is "a set of rules for minimum broadcast percentages of music and television originating in Canada. Launched in the early '70s, the rules require that roughly a third of Canadian radio airplay consist of Canadian artists or songs."- Slate
Before the late 1800s, printers had to arrange letters one-by-one on metal plates, a slow and painstaking process. Media maven Jeff Jarvis points out that, once the Linotype machine appeared toward the end of the 19th century, books and periodicals could be printed quickly enough to meet booming public demand. - The Christian Science Monitor
Several companies have been helping migrants apply for UK visas under the government’s Global Talent program by creating fake art portfolios, complete with fake published art criticism and art news. - ARTnews
Author and critic Olivia Laing agrees it’s taken the literary world “an embarrassingly long time to clock that you don’t need realism to write about how it feels to inhabit late capitalism and unravelling modernity”. - The Guardian
The number-one issue for the choristers, instrumentalists, and ballet dancers at the Opéra de Nice is low pay. Union spokespeople say some of their members net as little as €1,600 a month — in a resort city where housing costs are unusually high. - Riviera Radio (Monaco)
Against the suggestion that the furor over phones is no different from past outcries over new technologies, some point to novel features of social media—exploitative algorithms or “infinite scrolling”—to argue that this case is different. - Boston Review
