The data project shows that, despite recent improvement, works performed by major ballet companies are still overwhelmingly choreographed by men. - MSN (Chicago Tribune)
Faced with uncertainty surrounding the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the ancients rushed to fill in gaps, in essence producing a biography of the poet who, it was assumed, must have lived at some point in the past. - Lapham's Quarterly
"Had they not been rescued from a dusty storehouse seven years ago, the original negatives of hundreds of Mexican movies featuring the likes of the silver-masked crime-fighting wrestler El Santo, a bikini-clad Batwoman and the Satan-worshipping Panther Women would have been lost forever." - The Guardian
Spotify-like Kindle Unlimited subscriptions have made fiction into an “‘always on’ utility” that prioritizes “serial plenitude over singular encounters.” - The Baffler
Paweł Łukaszewski, now his nation's leading living composer, has written a lot of good music for choir. So have his Polish colleagues and predecessors going back centuries, he says, and he's started a festival in London to bring the rest of the world's attention to it. - Bachtrack
With crypto and blockchain, the movie and entertainment industry is poised to reinvent its business functions, facilitating secure, transparent, and traceable transactions across the market. - Fast Company
The cheap, cheesy horror stories became so popular, especially among older children and teens, that they were arguably a bigger factor in spreading literacy than was the introduction of mandatory public education. - Atlas Obscura
Before it happened, we in the sector viewed the prospect of such an outcome as intolerable: a Rubicon we would never allow to be crossed. - Sydney Review of Books
The director half of the Merchant Ivory filmmaking duo (and the oldest person ever to win an Oscar) says he and Ismail Merchant weren't public about their coupledom because of Merchant's Indian family but had little problem in their industry. (Ivory's also unusually frank about sex.) - The Guardian
In culture wars, both sides like to refer to self-evident sources of ‘the truth’ – such that ‘every sensible person must surely be able to recognize’. But... the formerly reliable solid ground is being replaced by quicksand. - Eurozine
In a new memoir, Arnold Lehman, who was director of the museum at the time, looks back at the culture-war media circus that broke out over the 1999 exhibition Sensation, and especially over Chris Ofili's painting The Holy Virgin Mary. - ARTnews
As dance companies are returning to the stage, the ghosts of those that no longer exist haunt the field. … Dance advocates see the vanished organizations as troubling signs that the art form, routinely under financial stress, may be shrinking, its structures drastically changing. - MSN (The Washington Post)
The Nieman Journalism Lab asked its readers who had cancelled to tell them why, and hundreds did. Ideological or political bias was cited, but it was by no means the primary reason. - Nieman Lab
You may not know of Concord Theatricals, but in the past five years, it has bought up Samuel French, Tams-Whitmark Music Library, and rights to the shows of Rodgers & Hammerstein and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Its majority owner — for now — is Michigan's state pension fund. - Forbes
The Lucille Lortel Awards will honor outstanding lead performer and outstanding supporting performer in a musical and in a play, thus cutting the number of acting awards almost in half (a single category is being added for outstanding ensemble). - The Hollywood Reporter
