Four debut novelists – Diane Cook, Avni Doshi, Douglas Stuart and Brandon Taylor – are up against the acclaimed Zimbabwean Tsitsi Dangarembga, and the Ethiopian-American Maaza Mengiste for the £50,000 award. - The Guardian
"There's not even blocking," says director Danya Taymor (Julie's niece). "I mean, there's a little blocking." That was worked out by the director and actors with Broadway's great clown, Bill Irwin. He and Taymor talked to Lauren Wingenroth about the play's non-choreography. - Dance Magazine
“In almost every rich country, women earn the majority of bachelor’s degrees. Almost every country that gives men and women equal access to education discovers, within a few decades, that women are doing better. - The Atlantic
"Whether you love or hate ebooks is probably a function of what books mean to you, and why. … What it means to read, what the experience of reading requires and entails, and what makes it pleasurable or not, is not so easy to pin down." - The Atlantic
LA Phil violist Ingrid Hutman: "When we're injured, we tend to go to sports doctors because that's what's available. It's very difficult to find practitioners who understand the peculiarities of musicians and what we do." - San Francisco Classical Voice
Two weeks ago, she was named executive director, working alongside Klaus Biesenbach, whose title was changed to artistic director. Last Friday, Biesenbach was appointed to lead Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie. Now MoCA says Biesenbach won't be replaced and Burton will be the sole director. - Los Angeles Times
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is giving a total of $1.3 million to public stations in Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and Jackson, Mississippi to develop digital services offering "hip-hop/R&B music while remaining true to public radio's values." Similar channels are in place in Chicago, Denver, Houston, and Norfolk. - Inside Radio
Erin Overbey: "As someone who's done the research, seen all the numbers, I can tell you that things are simply not changing quickly enough to present real, concrete progress." - Nieman Lab
The Praemium Imperiale, including ¥15 million ($136,000) for each recipient, is awarded for painting (Salgado, a photographer), sculpture (Turrell, a light artist), music (Ma, a cellist), architecture (Murcutt), and theater/film (no prize awarded this year). - Deutsche Welle
Yes, the Greek capital's grotty old seaport, which has been busy, industrial and unpleasant for 2,500 years, is seeing serious art galleries, and the high-end restaurants that service gallery patrons, bustin' out all over. - T — The New York Times Style Magazine
The concept of Purgatory was relatively new when Dante was born. Dante’s conception of Purgatory is remarkably like a wilderness boot camp. Its terrain is forbidding—more like an alp than like a Tuscan hillside. - The New Yorker
Some of the comedic experimentation that immediately followed 9/11 tested the limits of free speech for entertainers, who made up the new rules as they went along and found that even jokes about 9/11-adjacent subject matter occasionally crossed a line. - The Atlantic
Capitalism promises an endless series of alterations —tiny changes that... don’t amount to change at all. Aesthetic education, where “one suspends one’s current values in the expectation of acquiring better values,” can lead to more authentic transformations. - Commonweal
Works of art are not merely representations of the way things are but function to reveal and evolve a community’s shared understanding. Each time a new artwork is added to any culture, the meaning of what it is to exist is inherently changed. - 3 Quarks Daily
