"These inspired-by-real-life prosthetics are meant to bring authenticity, but they have a perverse way of achieving the opposite. … Playing people as heavily televised as Bakker and Ball seems to make prosthetic tweaks irresistible, yet the result usually lands the actor in the uncanny valley." - New York Magazine
The unit has impounded more than 3,600 antiquities, valued at some $200 million. They’ve raided art fairs on Park Avenue, and Christie’s in Rockefeller Center. They arrested a dealer at the five-star Mark Hotel and seized statues on display at the five-star Pierre. - The Atlantic
A gay silver-fox fantasy come to life? Nope, sorry. In 2006, workers excavating for an underground parking garage found what archaeologists determined was a garden designed for the notorious young emperor, and they've been working there ever since. 60 Minutes sent Cooper to have a look. - CBS News
Hayao Miyazaki of Studio Ghibli said in 2013 that he was retiring. Now, aged 80, he's back at work, the film titled How Do You Live? "I am making this movie," he says "because I do not have the answer." - T — The New York Times Style Magazine
P.S. Vinothraj worked in a flower market at age nine and a sweatshop at 14. At 19 he ran to the big city (Chennai) and slept on the streets. Now his first feature is a festival hit and India's official submission to the Oscars. - The Guardian
This was not some scheme dreamed up by Fox News or Rush Limbaugh or even the Cato Institute: this particular intellectual endeavor goes all the way back to the New Deal and FDR's "Four Freedoms" speech. (The Pilgrims, in this view, were proto-socialists mugged by reality.) - Slate
No, not his actual identity, we're afraid. But, if not the definitively correct version of the text of a play or poem, at least the most likely version. This is thanks to software developed by a Canadian startup called Cohere. - The New York Times Book Review
"ITsART … was rolled out across 26 European countries on Tuesday, with plans to expand into the U.S. and China next year. … Prices range from €2.90 ($3.25) for a movie to €9.90 ($11.10) for an exclusive live opera." - Variety
It's hard to believe now, but it was only this March that Beeple sold his original non-fungible token artwork for $69 million, setting off the NFT madness. Collins reported that it's one of the few words that's "broken through the COVID noise," with usage up 11,000%. - The Guardian
“Almost no theatre of color has a budget over $3 million. Until we reach $5 million, we don’t get access to commission funding or new-work development support. To funders, budget size conveys quality, excellence, and ability to deliver. There’s an inherent bias in providing organizations like us support.” - American Theatre
The answer is we got there via a thousand cuts, incremental concessions that have contributed to, and reinforced, the idea that mainstream media is often little more than another marketing arm of the global entertainment industry. - The Age (Melbourne)
A book signed by Queen Victoria and a first edition of the Radio Times from 1923 were lost when the fire broke out at Berwyn Books, Buckley, Flintshire. - BBC
Beyond grasping the stakes of these statistical debates, then, public engagement with neuroscience would be less prone to overreaches of ‘neurorealism’ if equipped with a better understanding of how scientists go about constructing tasks that can model reality in the scanner. - Psyche
Three of those killed were members of the Milwaukee Dancing Grannies, a group of women whose pompom routines have been a staple of local holiday parades since the 1980s. - The New York Times
