Two major projects were launched in 2017 aimed at getting more female acts on stages - ReBalance and KeyChange - after a BBC study had found around 80% of headliners were all-male. Five years on, new analysis by the BBC indicates there's been little change at the top of the bills. - BBC
Discovered by a Turin branch of the cultural heritage unit, a subsidiary of the Italian state police known as the Carabinieri, the 16th-century work, titled Portrait of a Man with a Beret, first went missing two decades ago from an undisclosed location. - ARTnews
We can at least say of the oil economy that its environmental damage, and consequent destruction of the human world, is only an epiphenomenon, whereas for the internet, the destruction of the human is itself the source of value. - LA Review of Books
"If the trend towards mobile phones continues, and there’s little reason to believe it won’t, landline phones could soon become an endangered species, much like the VCR and other technological relics before it.” - 3 Quarks Daily
I too grew up imbibing common technotopian fantasies of the late-20th Century zeitgeist, of a belief in humanity’s manifest destiny of multi-planetary spread and dominion. I just didn’t put the pieces of the puzzle together until I tried to understand climate change. - 3 Quarks Daily
“All these percussion solos from that period of time were written for young, acrobatic people. So the question is, what does an aging body, but a more experienced body, have to offer? And it turns out I’m a better player than I was. I don’t waste any time.” - The New York Times
Adam Gopnik considers how "slant rhyme" (English teachers call it assonance) and rap's constant use of it have revivified verse, both sung and spoken — and how long a history slant rhyme really has in the true-rhyme-impoverished English Language. - The New Yorker
The country's leading filmmakers, including Oleh Sentsov, Valentyn Vasyanovych, Serhiy Myhalchuk and Olga Beshmelnitsyna, are in the trenches, often literally, documenting Russian atrocities and the impact of the Ukraine war on its citizens. - The Hollywood Reporter
Goodreads, BookTube, Bookstagram, and #LitTwit have been around for many years now. Do the denizens of BookTok talk about or choose what they're reading any differently? Here's a look at what has and hasn't been scrambled on the newer platform. - Book Riot
 Research from the University of Canberra found that heavy news use dropped from 69% in April 2020 to 51% in January 2021, while those expressing high interest in the news fell from 64% in 2016 to 52% in 2021. - The Guardian
"Welcome to Octet, the Dave Malloy musical that acutely captures a life lived Too Online. Making its West Coast premiere ... through May 29, the production doubles as a support group for self-identified internet addicts, disclosing their demons in haunting eight-part harmonies." - Yahoo! (Los Angeles Times)
The emergence of deconstructivism – an ungainly portmanteau of the mid-to-late twentieth-century philosophical movement, deconstruction, and 1920s Russian constructivism – suggested that the avant-garde's apparent demise may have been rather exaggerated. - Dezeen
"The first decade or so of the 2000s wasn't exactly a time of artistic evolution for the special, but the rapid increase in special-making created an audience aware of the form's traditional tricks, tropes, and trappings — primed to get the joke when comedians started having fun with the form." - Vulture
It may not inspire political campaign ads the way critical race theory does, but the debate over how to teach children to read — perhaps the foundational skill of all schooling — has been just as consuming for some parents, educators and policymakers. - The New York Times
"In a city that ... became used to wailing air-raid sirens and the thuds of artillery from the suburbs, the audience was instead treated to the frothy melodies of Rossini's The Barber of Seville." But they're limiting the audience to 300 people so they can evacuate quickly if necessary. - The Observer (UK)
