Here's the deal: "Founded in 1898, the institution had capped membership at 250 since 1908; members are elected for life and pay no dues." Before this year, the only way to add a member was for another member to die - and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the Academy was made up of mostly white men. Poet Joy Harjo, one of the...
The details of what appears to be an outrageously short-sighted plan: "They are guardians of some of the nation’s most valued treasures, including Dickens’s manuscripts, a Shakespeare First Folio and five Leonardo notebooks. But librarians at the National Art Library in the Victoria and Albert Museum are feeling far from valued themselves, as two-thirds of them face losing their...
Three great tastes that taste great together. But seriously: Literature is replete with math (and music), and here's a professor who can talk about how Melville played with math in Moby Dick - and also disprove "an 18th-century Italian musical board game that promised 'un infinito numero di minuette trio.' The object of the game: Players compose a 16-bar...
The song cycle, with music by Jake Heggie and sung by baritone Joshua Hopkins, was inspired by Hopkins' sister, who was murdered by her ex-partner on the same day that he murdered two of his other exes. When she got the request, Atwood wasn't sure she could fulfill it. But "she ended up writing the sequence in one session....
This truly seems to delight English speakers. "For example, Coronamutationsgebiet is an area where coronavirus mutations are widespread. A Geisterveranstaltung (ghost event) is an event with no people in attendance, usually sports. Live music is allowed, provided the audience remains in their cars, at an Autokonzert." - NPR
While dealing with emotional turmoil after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, artist Kyohei Sakaguchi made a decision to merge his art and his life. First he published his phone number as a suicide hotline, and became more and more adept at helping others. "He wrote practical self-help books and answered phone calls, he painted abstract art and...
As New York cinemas open with precautions in place, "what movies are even playing in theaters these days? For those in attendance, the film in question wasn’t the main reason they showed up at their closest multiplex on a chilly Friday afternoon. Rather, audiences were guided more by a desire to get out of the house and sit in...
Conservatives heard that Loudon County had banished Dr. Seuss and started a backlash about "cancel culture." But that wasn't reality. "In fact, the Virginia county hadn’t banned his books but merely released guidance — back in 2019 — suggesting a pivot toward more diverse reading. Read Across America has been issuing the same guidance since 2018. And over the past several...
Cy Twombly designed an Aegean sea-colored ceiling mural in the Salle des Bronzes at the Paris museum, which is undergoing various renovations while closed to the public - renovations including repainting the Salle des Bronzes' walls. "A debate about the suitability of the new wall color — precisely 'Marron Côte d’Azur,' a reddish and black shade — has been...
Women, men, and nonbinary people all compete for the same award starting this year at the Berlin Film Festival - and this year's award went to a woman. "While some will argue gender-neutral categories are socially progressive, they will also have unintended consequences. It could, interestingly, lead to a battle between two different factions of equality campaigners." - BBC
When she started her major scholarship, "histories of photography traditionally focused on England, France and the United States. But Dr. Rosenblum’s ... A World History of Photography (1984), provided a true global perspective. The book was translated into several languages and remains a standard text in the field. Her other major work, A History of Women Photographers (1994), traced...
And Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, its director of 22 years, is leaving. "When Macgregor took over in 1999, the MCA was just eight years old and already on the verge of bankruptcy. Fewer than 100,000 people each year were visiting the converted Maritime Services Board art deco pile, which commands an imposing presence overlooking Circular Quay. Today more than 1...
Andra Day, who plays Billie Holiday in the new movie The United States Vs. Billie Holiday, explains how she felt when she heard it as a child. "It's in my DNA. It's in our DNA ... I think as a nation. And as a people, as Black people. I remember being very quieted by the song, almost sort of...
It's not great. "COVID has led to a sort of existential crisis for me working in journalism. When some of your readers claim that any facts you present that are inconvenient to their personal narrative are proof that you’re embedded in a conspiracy, you can only take so much of that before you start to question whether or not...
