The newspaper said that it paid an amount "in the low seven figures" for the game, which was released in October and gained hundreds of thousands of players within three months. The Times says that Wordle will remain free to users. - Ars Technica
It's not easy to do this, since people come from all over the world to see the classics, but the Florence museum's dynamic director, Eike Schmidt, is working to "get the dust off" and exhibit new art in dialogue with the old. - The New York Times
Parents, activists, school board officials and lawmakers around the country are challenging books at a pace not seen in decades. The American Library Association said in a preliminary report that it received an “unprecedented” 330 reports of book challenges, each of which can include multiple books, last fall. - The New York Times
"It's fine to boast about having Amazon and Netflix in our back yard but if they got a better tax credit in France or Mexico, they'd go there. We have amazing landscape, brilliant, technicians, writers, actors but we're not really nurturing the next generation." - BBC
On dating apps, music taste has become one of the primary ways of signalling one’s suitability as a mate – and how, by reducing people to profiles of their likes and dislikes, this taste has been weaponised. - The Guardian
Strasberg began to think about what made some performances succeed and some fail, and concluded that it must have to do with whether or not the actor was feeling inspired. This presented its own dilemma. - The New Yorker
Why is it a problem for a so-called dominant culture to utilize the forms and features of another? The short answer is that it isn’t. Rather, human history is replete with inspired interaction among various ethnicities and the sharing of creative traditions. - American Institute for Economic Research
How much Shakespeare do audiences really want these days? What adjustments are required in the performance of his canon to accommodate those who do not buy the line that Shakespeare is the “greatest” playwright of all time? - Washington Post
“In opera, there’s so much attention given to the craftsmanship of the music, the set design, the direction of the singing and choreography, in order to allow human moments to become amplified on stage. But that also means we need to take care of the human beings who are embodying those moments.” - The Guardian
"Horror cinema has long been in the business of mining terror from the everyday, of linking surface scares to primal subtexts ... there’s no denying that Sundance has played a particular role in fostering this latest strain of cinematic scare-making." - Los Angeles Times
Under Franco, the study of Spanish art languished - but Jonathan Brown, art historian, curator, professor, and mentor, brought luminous painters like Velázquez to mainstream attention. - The New York Times
