“There’s no way I could ever be in denial of what is happening in Ukraine,” he said during a series of interviews over the past week. “Russia is not a place where I want to raise my son. It’s not a place where I want my wife to be anymore. It’s not a place I want to be anymore.”...
Andrés Rubio, travel editor at El País, has just published a book arguing that Spain's natural beauty and historic cities and towns have been blighted by hasty, often chaotic real estate development with architecture that's often hulking, dull and even downright repugnant. - The Guardian
Lucas Mann, an English professor at a UMass branch campus: "For a professor at a school like mine, ... the trick isn't convincing students to drop their dogmas. It's convincing them that the stuff we're talking about could matter in lives already complicated by many other things." - Slate
"428 in all are closed, half of which are publicly owned. ... The (Ministry of Culture) has financed €420 million for performances in 2022, but nothing for infrastructure. The separate Reconstruction and Resilience Plan in Italy has not allocated anything for theatres, and many are waiting to collapse." - Gramilano (Milan)
The orchestra's board made the surprise decision — the stated cause being breach of contract — after Lang-Lessing announced that he will conduct the San Antonio musicians, who have been on strike since late September, in two benefit concerts next month. - Texas Public Radio
"Conservative activists in several states, including Texas, Montana and Louisiana have joined forces with like-minded officials to dissolve libraries' governing bodies, rewrite or delete censorship protections, and remove books outside of official challenge procedures." - MSN (The Washington Post)
Rachel Saltz, who joined the newspaper in 2003 and became dance editor in 2015, will now supervise classical music coverage as well. Her predecessor, Zachary Woolfe, was named the staff classical music critic earlier this month. - The New York Times
The artwork spent 150 years at a school in the Blue Mountains that's now owned by the National Trust of Australia, which sent the painting for conservation. Once the varnish was removed, conservators discovered the signature of Gerrit Willemszoon Heda (1624-1649), and the painting is worth several million dollars. - Artnet
Birtwistle's work was widely championed by many notable conductors, including Daniel Barenboim, Simon Rattle, Christoph von Dohnányi and Oliver Knussen, as well as soloists like violinist Christian Tetzlaff (who premiered his Violin Concerto in 2011) and pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard. - NPR
Lupu had retired from public performances in 2019, after several years of canceling many engagements due to poor health, and had not recorded since the mid-1990s. - NPR
"Cultural boycotting as an acceptable collateral consequence of war is egregious. There’s no reason to discriminate against individuals. Thousands in Russia, as well as in countries under the Russian yoke, like Belarus, have risked considerable retribution by speaking out against the war." - The Walrus
Hutchinson Guest was knowledgeable about a number of dance notation systems, which seek to preserve choreography as its creators intended rather than relying on memory or film. But she was particularly devoted to the one introduced by Rudolf Laban, which is now known as Labanotation. - The New York Times
The Free Artists from Industry Restrictions Act would overhaul California’s Seven Year Statute, removing a damages provision that discourages artists from leaving record deals after seven years and curtailing the amount of time actors are held off the market without pay between seasons. - The Wall Street Journal
It turns out that with enough training data and sufficiently deep neural nets, large language models can display remarkable skill if you ask them not just to fill in the missing word, but also to continue on writing whole paragraphs in the style of the initial prompt. - The New York Times
By 1915, Vroman’s could count traveling dignitaries, engineers, scientists, men of finance and New York book editors as customers. Anticipating their requests, the store carried more than 30,000 titles of fiction and nonfiction and boasted the “largest selection of Bibles in Southern California.” - Los Angeles Times
