Jacques Testard said that he would think it “very silly” if people called Fitzcarraldo the home of the Nobel. “It’s not like we have a strategy to try and win,” he said. His taste just happened to align with “a bunch of older bourgeois Swedish people” who decide the Nobel each year, he added. - The New York Times
She could probably now have any orchestra she wanted. But at the moment she doesn’t want any of them. She comes from a tightly knit musical family in her native Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital. She views the orchestra as a family. - Los Angeles Times
Hebrides Redacted successively removes notes from the 10- to 11-minute overture in proportion to the decline in humpback whale populations over many decades. A short film about the project (embedded above) was released today as part of the Cambridge Zero Climate Change Festival. - Ars Technica
For an American, it can be easy to forget how much ideology is packed into the genre — until you watch a film from elsewhere, and are confronted with the cartoonish heroes and villains of other cultures. - The New York Times
Our current problem isn’t an insufficient amount of Black representation in literature but a surfeit of it. And in many cases that means simply another marketing opportunity, a way to sell familiar images of Blackness to as broad an audience as possible. - The New York Times
Some performances of the Tony-winning production have continued amid clamorous walkouts or loud booing; one ended with a patron running from their seat and vomiting at a volume clearly audible to the actors. - Los Angeles Times
No, not the human kind. "The District was, all jokes aside, a lush swamp back in the Cretaceous period. Dinosaurs, muck-dwelling mollusks and megalodons patrolled the humid wetland" - and left their mark. - NPR
A new study shows that artists who are women and/or BIPOC earn about 23 percent less than white men, even in the non-professional creative economy - that is, the "side hustle" economy of writers, photographers, and social media content producers. - Fast Company
Jacqueline Woodson: "The ‘goodnight nobody’ always caught me by surprise and made me think ... I thought in including that ‘Goodnight nobody’ spread, Hurd and Brown were telling a quiet truth about emptiness and the world." - LitHub
Why a new biography now, 14 years after the star actor died? "The book is assembled from five years’ worth of interviews that the actor gave, between 1986 and 1991, to Stewart Stern, the screenwriter. ... The interviews were presumed lost; those transcripts were only recently recovered." - The New York Times
It's not a simple tale. The Orange County Museum of Art asked him what to say to viewers who were made uncomfortable. He responded, "I’ve never believed my role as an artist was to make work that ensured comfort, ... My paintings are purposefully subject to alternate interpretations." - Artnet
"The mystery genre, Park’s chosen conduit this time around, scratches an existential itch in the human condition, he thinks. Since our lives overflow with enigmas — the meaning of our birth, what comes after death, why the people around us behave as they do — we long for certainty." - Los Angeles Times
Just ask the writers of the 18th century like Coleridge and Shelley (perhaps not Mary Shelley, whose experience was, well, different). - The Guardian (UK)
Unity Phelan, who made three debuts in one week this seasons, says, "I always try to keep it light even when I’m just stressed out ... I think if I can convince myself that it’s OK, then I am OK." - The New York Times
