"The use of antidepressants has inadvertently left many of us less able to feel empathy toward others, laugh, cry, dream, and enjoy life just when we need those things the most: in the middle of a global pandemic." - Nautilus
"In 2009, the Green family, owners of the Hobby Lobby chain of arts-and- crafts stores, began acquiring a series of weathered fragments advertised as Dead Sea Scrolls, including this one, … were displayed at the Museum of the Bible. … Last spring, however, scientific analysis proved what a number of biblical scholars had begun to suspect: the sixteen...
"This month, in the wake of an appeals court decision favorable to the city and the recent completion of federal reviews, Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced that the Obama Presidential Center, including a 235-foot tower and major taxpayer-supported infrastructure, would finally be getting underway." - Chicago Reader
"Plans to mark the 800th anniversary of Burgos's magnificent Gothic cathedral with three enormous new bronze doors have ushered in an unholy row, with UNESCO advising against the project and critics attacking the €1.2m portals as an 'artistic outrage'. … More than 31,000 people have signed an angry petition attacking the new doors as 'an eyesore however you look...
"The new Netflix series Amend: The Fight for America, produced by Will Smith and Larry Wilmore, seeks to not through song, but extended, sleek, bingeable verve. … Amend, which focuses solely on the importance and liberties granted by the 14th Amendment, stretches across six hour-long episodes, each devoted to a different area of interest: citizenship, love, women's rights,...
Chris Jones: "The issue now is the future of an institution that is not just a major tourist draw to Chicago but one of the very few avenues for diverse, Chicago-based comedic talent to move to a national stage. A decades-long success record needs no reiteration here, nor does the entertainment-industry dominance asserted by the coastal cities that typically...
"I am honored and humbled by their intention but I have asked the leaders of the state legislature to remove the bill from any and all consideration. Given all that is going on in the world, I don't think putting me on a pedestal is appropriate at this time. … Perhaps after I'm gone if you still feel I...
"An ambitious £288m concert hall that was supposed to be 'the Tate Modern of classical music' has been scrapped by the City of London Corporation, which said the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic made the plan impossible to complete." The recently-announced departure from London of the project's highest-profile advocate, Simon Rattle, probably made this decision inevitable. - The Guardian
Martin Kettle: "Justifying the cost, the priority, the location and the uses to which the hall would be put were all delicate tasks in any case. It was hard not to see it as an elite project, only distantly connected with wider public need at a time when funding was being squeezed." Then came Brexit, followed by COVID. "It...
As the Australian government pushed the social media giant, along with Google, to pay news outlets there for use of their material for links, the search engine made deals, while Facebook decided to block all news links in the country as of Thursday. That morning, more than 250 Australian cultural organizations found their Facebook pages wiped clean: it seems...
In 2012, a different ABT alum, Julio Bocca, was named director of the Ballet Nacional del Sodre in Montevideo with the remit to raise the company's level. One of the first things he did was recruit his colleague, ABT soloist Maria Riccetto, to come back to her hometown and join the company; so she did, and she became a...
“The Met has a responsibility to our field and our global community,” Max Hollein says in a long statement posted today on the Met’s website. But, declaring a “historic crisis” for museums, he says: “It is my professional opinion that a deliberate deaccession program is appropriate, useful and necessary for a museum like ours. I also believe that we...
Among the winners of this literary resurgence is a micro-industry: book subscription services, which curate a selection for you and deliver them to your home. In an era of information overload and a crowded literary market with an often debilitating degree of choice, it isn’t hard to see the attraction of professionals highly attuned to the market – or...
The art fair leased a pair of converted townhouses in December last year, and it has now revealed that they will open as a new hub for international galleries to rent out for short periods, starting in October. - Artnet
The initiative combines entertainment metadata with Nielsen’s audience measurement data. It’s designed to equip content creators, owners, distributors and advertisers with data around onscreen diversity and representation to enable more inclusive content. - Los Angeles Times
