A culturally and politically monotone graduate class, on board with just about every woke nostrum going, not only dominates publishing houses’ workforce – it is now trying to dominate publishers’ output, too. - spiked
"The recorded music industry may no longer be laser-focused on the compact disc, but the format's sales grew in 2021 for the first time in 17 years, driven by superstar product boosted by retailer-exclusive collectibles, as well as by older catalog titles." - Inside Radio
"I’ve been working to know myself apart from my identity as a musician, which I always held in higher regard than my inherent worth as a human being. Even for musicians, life is much bigger than music, but I never really understood that until now." - Medium
Through the centuries, the complexity of classical Chinese characters functioned as a powerful class barrier, since mastering reading and writing took so much work. Attempts to simplify it go back to the Ming Dynasty, but those efforts got serious, and contentious, throughout the 20th century. - The New Yorker
"Claudia Roth has taken office pledging to continue her predecessor's work in decolonising museums, to set up a central 'green culture' desk, to boost funding for the arts and to rethink both the Humboldt Forum and a planned new 20th-century art museum in Berlin." - The Art Newspaper
Texts from the Prime Minister's phone indicate that the man paying for renovations to Boris's apartment at 10 Downing Street was pitching him on a new version of the 1851 Crystal Palace Great Exhibition — and getting a favorable hearing. - Artnet
The petroglyphs, at least 4,500 years old, in Big Bend National Park were ruined by "Isaac, Ariel, Norma, (and) Adrian," who carved their names on the rock on the day after Christmas. - Texas Monthly
Goli Sheikholeslami, who's leaving to become CEO of Politico, faced a firestorm over a program cancellation the week after she arrived at WNYC, where she went on to deal with bullying accusations against well-known hosts and staff fury at her choice of editor-in-chief. - The New York Times
"Cornish will host a weekly show for the network’s subscription streaming service, set to debut in the spring, and will contribute to its live programming. She also will host a new podcast and will appear on CNN covering breaking news." - Deadline
Perhaps best known these days as the mother of Rebecca Hall and the ex-wife of Peter Hall, she had a stellar career in the 1980s and early '90s, admired for singing and acting, and known as the first opera star to finish Salome's Dance of the Seven Veils nude. - BBC
Of vinyl, Ralph Kirkpatrick, a perfect winter for merging records - and a desire for order. "The forms and functions of the WTC offer something like an architectural experience — you wander through Bach’s arches, the keys catching and coloring the light." - MSN (The Washington Post)
Brandon Carter, a resident actor with ASC since 2018, assumes the directorship in a new management structure that the company describes as “a coequal group of individuals” running other departments such as operations, production and engagement. - Washington Post
The AFI Awards were postponed. The Critics’ Choice Awards — scheduled to be televised Sunday night in hopes of filling the void left by the Globes’ absence — were pushed back. The Palm Springs Film Festival was canceled. And most of those star-driven award favorites bombed at the box office. - The New York Times
The complexity that this wealth of data has revealed to us cannot be captured by theory as traditionally understood. “We have leapfrogged over our ability to even write the theories that are going to be useful for description,” says computational neuroscientist Peter Dayan. - The Guardian
