Elaine Padmore, artistic director 1982-94: "I was the casting director. I chose everything: repertoire, production teams, every singer, even the chorus. That was wonderful. It was the biggest area of total control of an artistic project that I’ve ever had, before or since." - Irish Times
These are some of the stories IATSE members have been sharing: "Eighteen-hour workdays with no lunch breaks. Car accidents caused by sleep deprivation. A crew member who returned to set the day after a miscarriage." - The Atlantic
"The castle at the center of the park, homage to the glorious medieval years after the bubonic plague wound down, when fair maidens and knights vanquished mysterious evils while kings and queens conquered the farthest reaches of the known world with the Christian God behind them." - The Paris Review
With half the world made up of women, the obvious question arises: Why have so few been granted the committee’s most prestigious prize and, more broadly, been generally underrepresented across the Nobel prizes? - The New York Times
The fall of Rome in 476 is a historical turning point that was invented nearly 50 years later as a pretext for a devastating war. The fact that it has since become recognized as the end of an epoch shows how history can be misused to justify otherwise unpalatable actions in the present. - Time
“The big concern here is that, basically, news organizations are now willingly performing much more extreme acts of censorship of their own content than what is being done in the EU under legal mandate. For some reason, most of them don’t acknowledge that.” - CJR
HarbourView is the latest player in what has become a high-stakes contest in the music business: the ownership and control of catalogs of songs, which streaming outlets like Spotify and Apple Music, along with a growing flank of social-media and gaming platforms, need to keep their users engaged. - The New York Times
“Not for me,” I said. “I know pretty much what I’ll think about it, and my review could get snarky.” “If so, that would be all right with us,” VAN said. “Well, OK,” I groaned back. So here I am and here goes.
"The refracted versions of self that appear in his writing allowed him to test out real-life modes of being; in turn, the acts of duplicity he practiced in his life generated daring new forms of artistic self-expression." - The New Yorker
Where were the limits exactly, in what was deemed to be a case of poetry plagiarism? How many lines that emerged while writing, any poet might ask, could be traced back to some half-remembered source? - LitHub
Sam Anderson: "The anti-careerism of her career is part of what has made her illegible to mainstream audiences. Although a legend in some circles, she is totally unknown in others." Observes Julian Schnabel, "It's not really a career. She's really unemployable." - The New York Times Magazine
“The orchestras I've worked with have been a bit like ocean liners. Very big, little hard to turn around. And I would say the Albany Symphony is like a sailboat. It's flexible, it's responsive, it can really turn on a dime. And a lot of that is David.” - Albany Times-Union
"In early-1950s America, Donald Webster Cory had probably the largest L.G.B.T. mailing list in the country, and maybe in the world." (Mr. Cory was not, strictly speaking, a real person.) - The New Yorker
"These various controversies are far from simple disputes between ‘conservatives’ and ‘progressives’ but emblematic of a discipline in which some protagonists lack a sense of its purpose and identity, or any real belief that music has value in and of itself." - The Spectator
The short answer is that Lord Elgin simply took them from the Parthenon and shipped them home to London. True as such, but, as this backgrounder explains, Elgin had reason to believe that he was doing the right thing and had legal permission to do it. - ARTnews
