"More than fifty years of writing about Naipaul! Yet only in the last few years, the dust having settled"— Naipaul died in 2018, and, writes Theroux, was a far less difficult person in his final years — " I have seen how complex our relationship was." - London Review of Books
"Let's say (Robin Williams is) singing the words 'reality, what a concept' — in that case … a royalty would have been generated and (Pandora) would be paying the license. But because he said the words 'reality, what a concept' … they didn't deal with it." - Yahoo! (Los Angeles Times)
Open Arts was initially founded as a residency program at Facebook. Artists were commissioned to create work along with employees on site at the company’s headquarters, giving Facebook workers insight into the artistic process. - Artnet
"With more than 200 million speakers, Swahili, which originated in East Africa, is one of the world's 10 most widely spoken languages and, as Priya Sippy writes, there is a renewed push for it to become the continent's lingua franca." - BBC
IPR began managing broadcast operations at the stations in 2007 and now the Board of Regents of the universities will decide on a proposal that would have the group take ownership of the stations. - Inside Radio
This staging, on the Mark Taper Forum's thrust stage, is the first time since playwright Jeremy O. Harris first workshopped the play at Yale. Here's a look at how the designer, director and staff adjusted to the new layout. - Yahoo! (Los Angeles Times)
"In a general way, I think men dancing has become a much more acceptable sort of profession. That change has had a lot to do with television and Strictly (Come Dancing). … There's been a massive shift, I think, in the public's perception of what dancing is." - The Sunday Post (Glasgow)
"The collection of 239 objects, encompassing Pueblo and Navajo pottery, textiles, and jewelry, is not well known, despite the fact that Barnes installed the textiles largely on the second floor of his (original) Merion gallery, where they eventually kept watch over the Matisse mural, The Dance." - MSN (The Philadelphia Inquirer)
"Standard levels of funding of arts and culture in Australia continue to lag behind major world economies and have failed to keep up with inflation or population growth, an analysis of spending shows." - The Sydney Morning Herald
The newspaper is removing words from the game's master list of possible word choices (mostly dirty words and obscure ones). Consequently, one day this week, people playing on the old Wordle page and on the Times page got different solutions to the puzzle. Social media was all abuzz. - Cnet
The research, involving well over 350,000 people in more than 50 countries, tested subjects for the "Big Five" personality traits (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism) and classified the (Western) music that respondents liked in five descriptive categories (Mellow, Unpretentious, Sophisticated, Intense, and Contemporary). - Ludwig Van
Female artists won six of the nine categories in the Berlinale's main section, including the Golden Bear (Carla Simón for her Catalan film Alcarràs), the Jury Prize, both acting awards, best screenplay, and, for best director, Claire Denis, taking her first major festival honor in 26 years for Fire. - Variety
Rex Whistler's wall painting includes depictions of black slaves on a leash and caricatures of Chinese figures. The room will no longer be used as a restaurant, as it had been for decades. Instead, Tate said the new installation would "be exhibited alongside and in dialogue with the mural, reframing the way the space is experienced". - BBC
Unfortunately, much of the language that surrounds their retroactive inclusion — through museum retrospectives, new biographies, and increasing market interest — makes it seem as if their systematic erasure has been a fluke of history, rather than an intentional sidelining. - Hyperallergic
