"Nothing short of a total overhaul of the category is in order. Every year, the Academy tweaks the rules, trying to improve the controversial and oft-criticized process by which the nominees are selected. ... But they won't get it right until the Academy rethinks the flawed logic behind the category." - Variety
"'Swearing produces effects that are not observed with other forms of language use. Thus, swearing is powerful,' a group of scientists from universities in the UK determined. 'It generates a range of distinctive outcomes: physiological, cognitive, emotional, pain-relieving, interactional and rhetorical.'" - New York Post
How do you adjust the acoustics of an already-completed auditorium? Turns out the architects and acousticians built in some adjustable features. - The New York Times
"(The package gives) subscribers access to bonus content, ad-free episodes, and other perks from nearly a dozen NPR podcasts including Planet Money, Fresh Air, and Code Switch. To join NPR+, listeners must make a new recurring contribution to their local member station starting at $8/month or $96/year." - Nieman Lab
"Horne, called a 'fearless agent for change' by New York's governor, was a Brooklyn-born singer and actress whose career spanned decades and broke barriers. The (theater) was built in 1926 as the Mansfield Theatre and got its first renaming in 1960 to pay tribute to New York Times drama critic Brooks Atkinson." - CBS News
“I have now been ‘in line’ on @Ticketmaster for over 4 hours just for the privilege of registering to buy @taylorswift13 tickets. Not even but the tickets, mind you, just register to buy them. How can this company be so consistently awful, yet still exist?.” - Los Angeles Times
Uncertainty about an artist’s intentions—including, but not limited to, which way she intended the picture to be top and which bottom—is not a sign of what a certain man would call a “hoax”; it is a sign of originality of purpose and a tolerance for open-ended inquiry. - The New Yorker
We spoke to a total of 33 people in the UK, all of whom had felt “called” to music in early life but then abandoned it in favour of other work, only to return to their music later. Rather than being singers, violinists or ukulele players they became IT managers, civil servants and pharmacists. - The Conversation
As a lot of the current people leave and a lot of new people who are there because of what they think Elon is going to do join, that’s going to significantly change the culture of the platform.” - The Atlantic
One ongoing effort to pin down the instable entity that is translation involves finding metaphors or analogies for it. This epistemological parlor game has resulted in a list that is long and still growing. The examples are instructive even if limited. - Hudson Review
Should we study the distant past to explore its strangeness—and jolt ourselves out of easy assumptions that the world we know is the only possible one? Or should we study the more recent past to understand how our world came into being—and thereby learn lessons for the future? - The Atlantic
"Forget Hollywood images of lithe women in coconut bras and grass skirts. ... Real hula is primal, archetypal, esoteric and ever- evolving. And it's now shared digitally all over the world." - Dance Magazine
To pull in viewers, HBO’s early executives dreamed up a network that ended up reflecting contemporary culture — its policing and crime, politics and industry news — better than many newspaper sections devoted to those topics. - Washington Post
The film, headlined by Viola Davis, about the female warriors of the old kingdom of Dahomey (in present-day Benin), has been running at the Canal Olympia in Cotonou (the nation's largest city) for a month — and it's still sold out. - The Guardian
She was famous for a kind of glamorous hauteur, which the bedraggled dining critics of today, with their furtive TikTok feeds and constantly buzzing phones, can only imagine. She was famous for her taste, which was considerable, and her work in the restaurant community. - New York Magazine
