If video games are play, they’re an expression of our highest capacities as humans—our love of freedom, of imagination, and creative whim. But when they are work then our affection for them is an extraordinary concession to modern conditions of unfreedom. - Dissent
Charles Packer's The Crown of Thorns premiered in Sydney in 1863 and was considered a masterpiece, sung every year at Eastertime by Australian choral societies — until everyone dropped it after 1936. Then, a few years ago, a collector found a score in a secondhand bookshop. - ABC (Australia)
A star of her scale taking on a studio of an even bigger scale, potentially burning whatever bridges remain, is an unusual gambit but it’s a fight that’s been steadily brewing since the pandemic sped up the streaming wars last year. - The Guardian
Principals from ABT (Calvin Royal III and Misty Copeland), NY City Ballet (Tiler Peck), the Martha Graham company, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane, Ballet Hispánico, Passion Fruit Dance Company, and Kaatsbaan (Stella Abrera), plus Savion Glover himself, consider the present and near future. - Harper's Bazaar
Arthur, starring everyone's favorite cartoon aardvark, debuted on PBS in 1996 and will air its final season in 2022. In fact, one of the show's writers said that production wrapped two years ago. - The New York Times
The manuscript was unfinished but well underway when Emily died at age 30. The legend has been that Charlotte, envious and conservative, threw it in the fireplace. Scholar Emily Zarevich considers whether this could be true and what might have been in the lost work. - JSTOR Daily
The network's founders hoped to supplant Fox News, but viewership is down by half since January. Why? Says one expert, "Newsmax is just not good. … Most of their lineup is … people who couldn't make it at Fox News. They just don't have any talent." - Vox
In 2019, alums and students at George Washington High School protested what they saw as racist imagery in a set of Victor Arnautoff frescoes there, and the school board voted to cover them up. Now a judge says that decision violated state law. - San Francisco Chronicle
Actors' Equity is requiring vaccinations. COVID safety officers are being added to production teams, and a leading epidemiologist has been hired to train them. Peter Marks looks into how the new measures are being put into practice. - The Washington Post
On Thursday, a 14-year-old visiting the attraction with his family jumped to his death; his was the third suicide there in less than a year. Said developer Stephen Ross, "We thought we did everything that would really prevent this." - The Daily Beast
Just over a week after Liverpool's waterfront was stripped of World Heritage status, the chief of the relevant UNESCO committee warns that the same could happen to other British monuments — and not only Stonehenge — if the government doesn't do more to prevent "ill-advised development." - The Guardian
Translations exist only in their own time. While literature is out of time, translations are always, in the hapless plod of linear time, out of joint. - The Walrus
Mr. Popeil’s mastery of television marketing, dating to the 1950s but spanning several decades, made him nearly as recognizable onscreen as the TV and movie stars of his era. - The New York Times
The new HBO film Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage offers a chilling demonstration of how greed, cultural rot, and the vagaries of crowd behavior can make a concert into a generation-defining thing for all the wrong reasons. - The Atlantic
