Why an entire bookstore and café devoted to scary things? "Imagine your problems were a ghost, a monster, a serial killer — that the thing stealing your power could be punched or séanced or set on fire. That you could kill it, that you could triumph. Horror is cathartic." - Toronto Star
Twin Cities spoken word artist and musician "SUNAH hopes to replace negative language some in the Hmong community use to describe LGBTQ people. There is no known word for queer or gay in the Hmong language." - Sahan Journal
After the sale of the Chicago Reader "was nearly derailed over a co-owner’s column opposing COVID-19 vaccine requirements for children," and after a lot of protests and work, the sale to a nonprofit is expected to work. - Seattle Times (AP)
"The characters in the showdown were as colorful as any drawn on the studio's animation cels: union activists, gangsters, communists and anti-communists, and, not least, Walt Disney himself, who, dropping his avuncular persona, played a long game of political hardball." - Salon
Co-founder of Bitch Magazine Andi Ziesler says that "the thing that made us stand out in an increasingly digital marketplace was the fact that we also had a print magazine. But the print magazine became increasingly hard to sustain because the cost of printing kept going up." - Slate
"If the very essence of Blaxploitation films to challenge the world order, the creative marriage between Kung Fu and Blaxploitation offered global imagery of resistance." - Black Film Archive
Look, this wouldn't really be a news story, but the energy trader who bought it said, "I’m walking away with the treasure while everybody is fighting over a Warhol or a Monet." The painting, by Ernie Barnes, also appeared as the cover of a Marvin Gaye single. - Los Angeles Times
"This protest was beautiful; we used our own craft and creative responsibility as artists to advocate for social change. From stenciled shirts to embroidered banners, from hand-printed posters to cardboard sculptures — our strike was a creative act." - Hyperallergic
Yeoh, on Everything Everywhere All at Once: "When we were doing the butt-plug fight sequences, I was on the ground, laughing my head off, going like: 'Oh my God! Would I have ever thought that one day I would be doing this kind of martial arts?'" - The Guardian (UK)
"There were impassioned statements on Ukraine, the killing of the Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, social media polarization, climate change, the deluge of disinformation and the global decline of democracy." Writers might not be able to solve it all. - The New York Times
The publishing house Vivat's 117 employees are scattered across the world because "the city of Kharkiv, where Vivat is based, has been under fire from the first day of the war to the present day." Those who stayed sent company equipment to those who left. - LitHub
Star David Motta, 25, "had called Russia home for 13 years. The Bolshoi Academy had taken him in as a boy and turned him into an international star." But he knew he had to leave when Russia invaded Ukraine. - France 24 (AFP)
"As media habits change, the entire system is likely to be overhauled, and the networks are relying more heavily on Nielsen rivals, trying to gain more control over the process — before someone else does." - Variety
