Brian Lin: "At the start of the pandemic, I emailed friends, colleagues, and mentors, all POC, to ask two questions about their literary lives. What is a recurring situation that’s destabilizing and hard to navigate? What guidance would you offer a fellow person of color for navigating such situations?" - Los Angeles Review of Books
When Nawapan Kriangsak inherited the priceless art collection of her father, scholar and collector Douglas Latchford, she already had a plan in motion to return his art to Cambodia, from whence most of it came during that country's civil war. Latchford's death in 2020 ended extradition efforts after "federal prosecutors in New York charged him with trafficking in looted...
The word for pandemic is absolutely Greek, but nearly everything else the Greeks discuss about COVID-19 is English - and a leading linguist is worried. "Far too many are entering spoken and written Greek. On the television you hear phrases such as ‘rapid tests are being conducted via drive-through’, and almost all the words are English. It’s as...
She died in what her team said was a "terrible accident" in Athens while celebrating the full moon. "SOPHIE was a trailblazer in almost every respect. The Scottish-born, L.A.-based producer transformed underground dance music, melding the worlds of house, techno, trance, pop and the avant-garde into something brazenly new and undeniable." - NPR
A $2 million donation means that musicians and staff have salaries and health care through June, despite the fact that there's no revenue coming in from concerts. - Nine News (Denver)
Penman's best-selling, lengthy books about medieval England and Wales were stuffed with research - and drama. But "such was her commitment to the factual record that she kept a running list on her website of historical errors in her novels, owning up to even the most minor offense, like describing a medieval greyhound as 'brindled,' long before the breed developed that...
Mark Swed thinks so: Bernstein "devoted four years to the musical. He wrote more music for it than for any other theater work. The show had a $900,000 sponsorship from Coca-Cola. It was billed as the musical of the decade. The show closed on Broadway after seven performances. It was the biggest artistic disaster of Bernstein’s life. The reviews were just...
Writer, studio musician at Sugar Hill Records, and singer, Bootee couldn't take the upbeat party aims of early hip-hop. So he wrote "The Message" about the serious, gritty life of his hometown, Elizabeth, N.J. Questlove: "The world (me included) absolutely froze in its tracks the week it debuted on radio. ... Hip-hop was once known as party fodder, a...
Wesley Morris: "Alas, she would not be playing the most daring, out-there characters. And let’s face it: the great parts were always headed to someone whiter anyway. The more audacious move was to declare herself a moral progenitor, to walk with her head high so that Denzel Washington might become a man on fire and Viola Davis could learn...
That's merely one thing that's missing right now, of course, but it is missing, and Dublin isn't going to let people forget the joys of moving their bodies alongside so many others at dance clubs. "Who’s in charge of making sure we have the facilities to be a city? Who’s in charge of making sure there’s somewhere for us...
The SETI Institute is ready to take music to Mars, or wherever. While it's a listening project, it's also now a beaming project. A founding astrophysicist and a musician "have devised the 'Earthling Project': a call to people everywhere to upload snippets of song that plans to meld into a collective human chorus. An initial composition will be...
Bernadine Evaristo, author of 2019's Booker prizewinning Girl, Woman, Other, is launching, or relaunching, a series of Black British novels that didn't quite make it into the British canon. "Our appreciation of literature is deepened when we understand the foundations from which each new generation creates literature anew, but because so much of the body of black British literature...
The Broadway League and the American Theater Wing: "One, the much-delayed awards will be scheduled 'in coordination with the reopening of Broadway.' And two, the voting will take place from March 1 to March 15." OK. Why not be flexible at this point? - The New York Times
