No, it's not that they thought show business was too risky: they literally could not conceive of such a thing as earning a living by telling people jokes you made up. Of course, now that he's on television every week (Saturday Night Live), it makes more sense to them. - Vulture
"About a week after Broadway shut down, Scott and Catherine Ricafort McCreary launched a support group for artists interested in making a career switch. 'We thought: If your job is gone, there's never a better time to learn what we did." The group? Artists Who Code. - Yahoo! (Los Angeles Times)
"The collective pause spurred an unprecedented reflection on what they weren't getting from their prepandemic jobs and what precarious elements they had tolerated. ... Some are leaving the door open to return to theater someday. Others say they'll never go back. Here are 10 of their stories." - Yahoo! (Los Angeles Times)
Funded by the US Embassy as part of the World Monuments Fund's 15-year Future of Babylon project, the current work includes stabilization and conservation of the Lion of Babylon statue, the Ninmakh Temple, and the famous Ishtar Gate, which will be completed this summer. - The Art Newspaper
"Alongside its sister show, Poetry Unbound, On Being will move from a weekly radio production to a seasonal podcast model. The show plans a yearly release schedule of two seasons, each one made up of 10 to 12 episodes, with the first season to begin in October." - The New York Times
"Schnabel's 23-painting show at the Centro de Arte Comporaneo (in Málaga) was expected to open on Friday, but it will no longer kick off as planned, since it became impossible for the museum to obtain all the works on time." - ARTnews
The streaming giant said 52,600 artists earned more than $10,000 (£7,500) from Spotify in 2021. Of those, 130 were paid more than $5m (£3.8m) over the last 12 months. - BBC
Think of all the speeches peppered with statements attributed to revered predecessors. Listeners are supposed to infer that the speaker has drawn upon a vast reservoir of material gathered from a lifetime of reading. But no: it was probably a quote pulled from such a compilation after two or three minutes of looking. - Los Angeles Review of Books
Whenever I see people in old movies say “Swell!” or the like, I always wonder what other kinds of things they said when we weren’t listening. There’s no reason to think they weren’t as linguistically fun as we are now. - The New York Times
What was the simplest task in the geometric domain — independent of natural language, culture, education — that might reveal a signature difference between human and nonhuman primates? The challenge was to measure not merely visual perception but a deeper cognitive process. - The New York Times
Growth under these conditions is incredibly difficult, and of course the pandemic has thrown a giant monkey wrench in operations for nonprofits around the country, including Resonance Works. Where to begin? - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
The paper argues that eye-catching elements in a Pompeiian home would have been important status symbols, with buildings designed to highlight some features while minimizing others. Using angled walls or building raised floors, for instance, would have made a home’s interior seem larger and more impressive. - Artnet
"It's incredible to consider the lengths we used to go to in forgiving artists for being bad people. ... The myth of the high-functioning addict whose great work was fueled by liquor and drugs has become, if not entirely passé, at least less visible." - T — The New York Times Style Magazine
What’s curious about the brutality that fuels Internet shaming frenzies is that in real life—that is, IRL, in the usual online parlance—most of us would hesitate to consign a normal nobody to nationwide notoriety and several years of unemployment. - The New Yorker
Maia Kobabe: "I'm learning that a book being challenged or banned does not hurt the book and does not hurt the author. The book is selling better than ever. ... A book challenge is like a community attacking itself. The people who are hurt in a challenge are the marginalized readers." - Slate
