It's not just about music, but "as Latin music’s popularity balloons well beyond the Hispanic community, podcasters see opportunities for additional growth." Podcasts, like a lot of media in the US, need to expand beyond a majority white, mainly affluent audience. - Los Angeles Times
Pompeii, the city buried by Vesuvius' eruption in the year 79 CE/AD, nearly lost its fame and fortune again in 2010 this time because of squabbling, corruption, and neglect that caused the excavated gladiator training hall to collapse. But Pompeii is now back - again. - Seattle Times (AP)
Well, not just sometimes. "The practice provides a valuable form of understimulation, an inoculation against an illness-inducing reality." - Los Angeles Review of Books
A new show with veteran journalist Lisa Ling does what Ling's 10-year-old self could only imagine. "Food and travel shows sometimes take an idealistic approach, positioning food as a unifier," but in this one, "Food has become a vehicle for unlocking stories that have gone untold." - HuffPost
"In an image-saturated world — over 63 million were uploaded to Instagram alone in a single day in February, according to Internet Live Stats — it can be difficult for people who are blind or have low vision to fully experience the web." - The New York Times
Shows like Who Do You Think I Am have "this effect of normalizing disability and showing us that people with Down syndrome are part of our culture and part of our society and part of our stories." - CBC
Says expert Dr. Ebony Thomas, "People are used to seeing fantasies and fairytales as all-white, particularly in faux-medieval or magical-medieval settings. ... We’re taking them out of the dream space. We’re taking them out of how they imagined it could be." - The Guardian (UK)
"Some writers worry a pandemic plot might drive away readers who want to escape our grim reality, but ignoring it might feel jarringly unrealistic. Others wonder if it’s too soon to recreate the atmosphere of a tragedy that’s still killing thousands of people every day." - The New York Times
The streamer is always on the hunt for new talent, so an emerging director showcase is logical. One director: "I jokingly say it’s like film school but . ... It gives you a sense of what that real film world is going to be like." - Los Angeles Times
"When you inherit someone else's cookbook, there are stories contained within it beyond the author's words; there are stained pages, dog-eared recipes and notes in the margins that point to family dinners, special occasions and, occasionally, a disastrous night thanks to an unedited recipe." - Salon
Events can overtake the imagination - and then after some decades, it's time to re-imagine experience and reaction. Basically, "this is how life is; people have ideas, but they also have deep inner doubts about those ideas." - The Guardian (UK)
Witness a folk remedy popular in the 19th century: "If the heart of a corpse contained blood, it was believed that it showed it was living off the blood and tissue of living family members—that the corpse was preying on the living." - LitHub
Only pundits know, and even they don't really know much. "The Academy declared 276 films from 2021 as Oscar-eligible, and much of the responsibility for spotlighting films falls on bloggers and columnists." But Film Twitter isn't real-life voting. - Variety
The musical Mrs. Doubtfire closed temporarily because of Omicron and will not reopen until April. "The hiatus left the show’s cast, crew and musicians without work ... but said he thought it was the best way to attempt to preserve their jobs longer term." - The New York Times
In this production, via recordings, "singers from six prison musical groups — a mix of over 100 men and women who are incarcerated as well as about 70 community volunteers — are the ones singing the 'Prisoners' Chorus.'" - NPR
