First, Stephen Sondheim couldn’t come up with songs because he didn't think James Lapine's script needed any. So began a cascade of calamities, right up to the Broadway opening, until the show shocked everyone involved by getting 10 Tony nominations and a Pulitzer Prize. - The New York Times
Mohammed Rezuwan is himself one of the hundreds of thousands of Rohingya driven out of Myanmar by that country's military and mobs. He now travels around the refugee camps at Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, recording and translating his people's traditional stories. - PRX's The World
Following in the footsteps of the Uffizi in Florence, the St. Petersburg museum will auction off digital tokens of five works in its collection, one each by Leonardo da Vinci, Giorgione, Monet, van Gogh, and Kandinsky. - Artnet
The 39-year-old's decision to end his 20-year career with the company next May comes three years after the scandal roiled City Ballet and two weeks after colleague Georgina Pazcoguin revealed in a book that he would regularly tweak her nipples as a greeting. - The New York Times
The much-praised new branch of the New York Public Library, across 5th Avenue from the famous flagship, wasn't supposed to happen. The NYPL board was bent on selling the branch property — until The Nation reported on the plan and advocates set furiously to work. - The Nation
Granted, the program was only just gearing up when the pandemic closed arts venues, but officials' hopes that 18-year-olds would use their few-strings-attached €300 to sample high culture are being punctured by reality. - The New York Times
Among the monuments added are Madrid's Paseo del Prado and Retiro Park, the old port of Guangzhou, Peru's ancient Chankillo observatory, Mexico's 16th-century Tlaxcala Cathedral, Ramappa Temple in south-central India, Sudanese-style mosques in the Ivory Coast, and the city of Nice. - The National (Abu Dhabi)
“Many of the first-choice people said, ‘Look I’m sorry, I’m not doing this any more. I have a family. I had to take another profession. Six months ago, I’d have welcomed it’,” he said. - The Guardian
‘Looted’ is a contested term: it covers a spectrum from out-and-out pillage to ostensibly legal transfers of title that may have occurred under coercion or under rigged laws. - Apollo
The public radio network’s operating revenue slid just two percent in 2020 to $270.1 million. And last year’s revenue was actually up seven percent from 2018 when NPR reported $251.3 million in operating revenue. - Inside Radio
From the early Middle Ages, various European languages adopted and adapted the Latin alphabet. So why did English end up with a far more inconsistent orthography than any other? - Aeon
I felt ashamed of my mistake, for not seeing a colleague for who he really is. “How limited your perception is, Lily!” I thought. And: “I wonder how much else I miss?” Probably, I decided, quite a bit. - San Francisco Chronicle
“Because of streaming, because of the pandemic, because of the enormous production of longform content … the word movies — what we think of as a movie — is evolving and no longer means what it did just a couple of years ago." - The Hollywood Reporter
The proof (as if Marvel weren't enough): Space Jam: A New Legacy — whose subtitle should be "Warner Media: We Own the Rights to a Lot of Shit and We Want You to Interact With All of It. At Once. And to Get Your Kids Hooked Early." - Vulture
Even our most mundane habitual routines actually display a great deal of intelligence. Indeed, they are often intelligently context-sensitive and flexible in such a way as can support and structure our goals and projects. - Psyche
