The Peabody- and Pulitzer-winning audio series lost much of its luster (and gave up its awards) when its primary subject was revealed to be a big ol' liar fabulist. Media columnist Nicholas Quah considers how the flawed material got past editors in the first place, what consequences have been suffered by the main people involved, and the complications the...
A cow sporting VR goggles is comedic as much as it is tragic. There’s horror, too, in that it may foretell our own alienated futures. After all, how different is our experience? We submit to emotion trackers. We log into biofeedback machines. We sign up for tracking and tracing. We let advertisers’ eyes watch us constantly and mappers store...
The Sumerians had cuneiform and the Egyptians hieroglyphics, both complex and difficult to master, but who developed the system where each character represents a particular sound and the characters (letters) can be combined to form words the way sounds are? The Phoenicians invented the alphabet from which all the European and Near Eastern scripts (and possibly those of India...
Museums and galleries faced financial challenges that threatened their very existence, as Black Lives Matter uprisings forced a reckoning with the art world’s structural racism and controversial monuments that celebrate shameful histories around the globe. - Artnet
"The folks behind Encore Monthly, a brand new magazine about theatre that just published its first issue …, think the time is ripe to provide theatregoers, deprived as we are of theatre we can witness in person, to read about it, and they say they're equipped to hang on until it comes raging back." In a Q&A, founding editor-in-chief...
Ugh. In our current structure, boards of directors for nonprofits don’t work. I’m sure there are outliers with highly functioning boards, but this is not the norm. How do we fix this? - American Theatre
Despite the disastrous rollout of a book that had been advance-hyped by some as a Grapes of Wrath-level work of literature, Jeanine Cummins's thriller about an Acapulco bookseller and her young son on the run from a drug cartel was the top-selling novel for adults of 2020. Here's a report on how the rise and fall and rise of...
The place is Caral, estimated to be 5,000 years old and now a UNESCO World Heritage site in the Peruvian coastal desert about 125 miles north of Lima. Archaeologist Ruth Shady discovered the ruins in 1994. Over the past year, an extended family of squatters has made repeated invasions, claiming that the land — which has increased in value...
" was an aspiring actor and stand-up comic who began writing fiction in his mid-30s and shaped a witty, conversational and sometimes graphic prose style. It brought him a wide readership through such novels as Sister, Sister and Naughty or Nice and through his Gideon crime fiction series, which included Sleeping With Strangers and Resurrecting Midnight." - Yahoo! (AP)
Disney bought the rights to the specially shot and edited footage of the Broadway production and planned to release it in movie theaters — until the pandemic changed everything and the show was put on Disney+ instead. That's similar enough to other movies from 2020 that the Globes consider Hamilton eligible; SAG, oddly, puts it in the TV movie...
The long-financially-strapped school — which shut itself down last March, only to reverse that decision a month later after raising $3 million — has one valuable asset other than its campus that it could sell: a piece of meta-art by Rivera depicting workers painting and installing a Diego Rivera mural. And the creator of the Star Wars franchise wants...
Rules vary quite a bit between the eight countries covered here. The Netherlands, which has seen a huge surge in cases, is quite strict; Sweden, which was much laxer than most of the continent, has gotten more strict but still less so than France or Germany (which is letting some performances continue without audiences). Spain's measures vary widely by...
It's not as bad as it was last spring, and, in London, not too different from the last couple of weeks. "As per Gov.uk guidance, 'training and rehearsal without an audience (in theatres and concert halls)' will be exempt from the rules regarding business closures, while auditoria will be able to open 'for the purposes of film and TV...
The ceremony, hosted by Trevor Noah, had been scheduled for January 31. It will now take place on March 14, due to, as a statement from the Recording Academy puts it, "the deteriorating COVID situation in Los Angeles, with hospital services being overwhelmed, ICUs having reached capacity, and new guidance from state and local governments." - Variety
Production shutdowns are expensive, and a delay of a few weeks would disrupt series’ delivery dates and air pattern. This is especially crucial for broadcast series whose current seasons are already airing. - Deadline
