"I want us to do everything from experimental work to some story ballets or reimagined classics. There are certain neoclassical choreographers I would like to bring in. As far as Balanchine, I am certainly a fan; I don't see the repertoire being as heavily Balanchine as it has been." - Pointe Magazine
On the waste-of-money side are several MPs, including one who's asked the National Audit Office to investigate the festival. Unboxed's chief creative officer insists that the project is "absolutely value for money" and that millions have people have engaged with hundreds of events, many on local, under-the-radar levels. - BBC
One out of every 10 full-time workers was homeless at some point in the previous two years, and two-thirds didn’t have enough money to pay for food. At the same time, in 2018, Disney’s CEO Bob Iger collected $65 million—or 1,424 times the median salary of a Disney employee. - Daily Beast
Is it too expensive? Too inaccessible for performers without money? Too crowded? Too concentrated? Just too damned big? With so many people saying the Fringe is spinning out of control, a panel of five regulars offer suggestions for fixing the Scottish capital's massive event. - The Guardian
London's Pleasure Gardens transformed the concept of leisure. Offering an environment in which societal norms could be cast aside, if only for a few hours, they captivated the public with their heady mix of culture, fashion and vice. - BBC
"It's difficult to cement a medium's sense of identity, culture, and meaning if hardly anybody is talking about the same thing — and that may well have material ramifications for the business in the long run." - New York Magazine
"Ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, TikTok announced Wednesday it is banning of campaign fundraising on its platform. It also announced new policies for political accounts, including 'mandatory verification.'" - CBS News
Price isn't the only barrier for a classical newcomer, but it's a big one, and the few American organizations that have tried pay-what-you-wish — most notably, the Chicago Sinfonietta and, this past summer, Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra — say it works. But what about lost ticket revenue? - The New York Times
"A staggering 82 to 97 percent of book challenges go unreported on. That means these books, the overwhelming majority, don't even make it beyond the school-board minutes and into the local paper. And this question of how much attention a book gets ... is a crucial factor." - MSN (The Atlantic)
"Effective immediately, the new contract replaces a two-year deal signed during the pandemic in September 2020, which required a 25% pay cut for the musicians until audiences returned in full. With attendance relatively strong again, ... musicians were able to make some modest gains in the new contract." - The Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
The tremendous success of her Thomas Cromwell trilogy (Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, and The Mirror and the Light) led to a reassessment of her other work (17 books in total, plus numerous stories and essays) that established her reputation of one of this century's greatest English-language novelists. - The Guardian
"Working across sculpture, installation, performance, dance, film, and photography, Nengudi is best-known for her R.S.V.P. series. ... These pantyhose sculptures are often filled with sand, then stretched and pinned to various points of a wall (often in a corner). They sag and droop in ways best described as poetic." - ARTnews
If excessively strong cravings were simply the result of drugs corrupting the reward systems in the brain, they should be produced across individuals who use drugs repeatedly over time. This is not the case. - Aeon
It shouldn’t shock us that many of them had uncomfortable and even traumatic experiences. Memoirs by Sarah Polley and Jennette McCurd force us to confront why we love to see child stars, and what our appetite for cute white kids says about us. - The Conversation
