“It’s not untrue that these genres are a kind of record company plot to sell us music but there’s a reason why this conspiracy has been so successful: they were recognising real communities and finding ways to serve them. - The Guardian
Left for dead with the advent of CDs in the 1980s, vinyl records are now the music industry’s most popular and highest-grossing physical format, with fans choosing it for collectibility, sound quality or simply the tactile experience of music in an age of digital ephemerality. - The New York Times
In HBO's 15 Minutes of Shame, Lewinsky — the prototype victim of worldwide public humiliation via the media — argues that today's Twitter-driven pile-ons could stop if the pilers simply paused and thought about their targets as actual people. Lili Loofbourow explains just why that's way too optimistic. - Slate
Humanity was not restricted to small bands of hunter-gatherers, agriculture did not lead inexorably to hierarchies and conflicts and there was not one mode of social organisation that prevailed, at least until thousands of years after the introduction of agriculture. - The Guardian
The show 12 Last Songs at Leeds Playhouse consists solely of dozens of people talking about, or actually doing, what they do for a living: a midwife lecturing about the birth process, an astrophysicist talking about stars, a chef making dinner, a decorator hanging wallpaper. - The Guardian
Shakespeare North Playhouse is on course to open next summer, joining only a handful of historically accurate, wooden-framed theatre auditoriums in England. - The Stage
Richard Hambleton painted his dark silhouette figures around the Lower East Side in the 1980s, becoming "the godfather of street art." The artist known as Nullbureau has lately been painting fresh copies of Hambleton's Shadowmen around New York, and some Hambleton devotees are outraged. - The New York Times
These are the series that are both influential and significant, that have broken new ground, that have reflected life specifically in this century, or that have changed the culture of TV in some way. - BBC
"For more than 40 years, his Catalan connections, his communist leanings and his celebrity made him a suspect in the eyes of the French police and intelligence services. His request for naturalization was denied. He was the target of xenophobia and identity politics." - The New York Times
New research suggests that it’s not just negative emotions that contribute to the appeal of conspiracy theories. People can also find conspiracy theories entertaining – and the more entertaining people find them, it seems, the more likely they are to believe in them. - Psyche
Artists from Richard Pryor to Moms Mabley to Ma Rainey "took big risks to affirm LGBTQ people and be honest about their own sexuality. … Chappelle is doing something they never did — making a career of going after a group even more reviled than Black people." - CNN
Five years after he retired from A Prairie Home Companion, four years after accusations led public radio and publishers to drop him, Keillor is self-publishing and doing speaking gigs before forgiving audiences. He has no regrets, but his account of things is, well, sanitized. - MSN (The Washington Post)
Writes the Columbia University linguist and New York Times columnist of Terence Blanchard's Fire Shut Up in My Bones and William Grant Still's Highway 1, U.S.A., "the tradition being appropriated here is based on a philosophy of composition and audience reception hardly inevitable." - The New York Times
The announcement comes seven months after high-profile editor Joshua Wolf Shenk was forced to resign after an indecent exposure incident on Zoom and multiple accusations of inappropriate behavior. The final issue will be February/March 2022. - AP
"Africa saw an increase in offenses related to digs, up from 44 incidents in 2019 to 153 in 2020. The starkest increase occurred in Asia and the South Pacific, from 42 to 1,563. In total, more than 35,000 items were reported stolen across the world." - ARTnews
