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Maria Ressa Just Won A Nobel – Only The 18th Woman In 126 Years To Win

With half the world made up of women, the obvious question arises: Why have so few been granted the committee’s most prestigious prize and, more broadly, been generally underrepresented across the Nobel prizes? - The New York Times

The Fall Of Rome Didn’t Happen When You Think It Did

The fall of Rome in 476 is a historical turning point that was invented nearly 50 years later as a pretext for a devastating war. The fact that it has since become recognized as the end of an epoch shows how history can be misused to justify otherwise unpalatable actions in the present. - Time

The Right To Be Forgotten: Should Newspapers Have To Remove Your Name If You Ask Them?

“The big concern here is that, basically, news organizations are now willingly performing much more extreme acts of censorship of their own content than what is being done in the EU under legal mandate. For some reason, most of them don’t acknowledge that.” - CJR

New Player In Billion-Dollar Music Rights Management

HarbourView is the latest player in what has become a high-stakes contest in the music business: the ownership and control of catalogs of songs, which streaming outlets like Spotify and Apple Music, along with a growing flank of social-media and gaming platforms, need to keep their users engaged. - The New York Times

When Jan Swafford Was Asked To Review An AI-Written “Beethoven Tenth” Symphony

“Not for me,” I said. “I know pretty much what I’ll think about it, and my review could get snarky.” “If so, that would be all right with us,” VAN said. “Well, OK,” I groaned back. So here I am and here goes. 

Oscar Wilde — Martyr? Wit? Predator? Artist? “Posing Somdomite”? All Of The Above, Which Is Why We Misunderstand Him

"The refracted versions of self that appear in his writing allowed him to test out real-life modes of being; in turn, the acts of duplicity he practiced in his life generated daring new forms of artistic self-expression." - The New Yorker

Of Poetry, Plagiarism, And Artistic Influence

Where were the limits exactly, in what was deemed to be a case of poetry plagiarism? How many lines that emerged while writing, any poet might ask, could be traced back to some half-remembered source? - LitHub

Explaining The Unexplainable Career Of Laurie Anderson

Sam Anderson: "The anti-careerism of her career is part of what has made her illegible to mainstream audiences. Although a legend in some circles, she is totally unknown in others." Observes Julian Schnabel, "It's not really a career. She's really unemployable." - The New York Times Magazine

The Transformative Conductor: David Alan Miller @ 30 Years Leading The Albany Symphony

“The orchestras I've worked with have been a bit like ocean liners. Very big, little hard to turn around. And I would say the Albany Symphony is like a sailboat. It's flexible, it's responsive, it can really turn on a dime. And a lot of that is David.”  - Albany Times-Union

How A Little Book-Of-The-Month Mail-Order Club Laid Ground For The Gay Rights Movement

"In early-1950s America, Donald Webster Cory had probably the largest L.G.B.T. mailing list in the country, and maybe in the world." (Mr. Cory was not, strictly speaking, a real person.) - The New Yorker

The New Musicology: Beethoven Was Just an “Average White Composer”?

"These various controversies are far from simple disputes between ‘conservatives’ and ‘progressives’ but emblematic of a discipline in which some protagonists lack a sense of its purpose and identity, or any real belief that music has value in and of itself." - The Spectator

So How Did the Elgin Marbles End Up At The British Museum In The First Place?

The short answer is that Lord Elgin simply took them from the Parthenon and shipped them home to London. True as such, but, as this backgrounder explains, Elgin had reason to believe that he was doing the right thing and had legal permission to do it. - ARTnews

Edward Snowden: Balancing Risk, Reality And Facts

The true challenge is not to enumerate the risk, but to live with it; to stake out the resilient middle ground between denying danger altogether and finding nothing but danger everywhere. - Edward Snowden

Verbatim Drama, Straight From Real Life, Comes To Broadway

Tina Satter, whose Is This A Room is a transcript of the FBI interrogation of intelligence leaker Reality Winner, and Lucas Hnath, whose Dana H. is his mother's account of her months-long abduction, talk about the importance of telling living people's real stories onstage. - The New York Times

What Runaway Hit “Squid Game” Shows About South Korea’s Problems (It Isn’t Pretty)

"(The Netflix series's success) might be somewhat ironic given that Squid Game is all about socioeconomic divides, the exploitation of the poor by the rich, and the desperation of Korea's financially destitute class of laid-off workers." - Vox

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