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France Cancels An Order For 800,000 Copies Of Beauty And The Beast For Schoolkids

And the illustrator is pretty sure he knows why: “The characters in the new books have ‘darker skin instead of blonde fairy-tale princesses.’” - BBC

YouTube Is Reviving The Career Of This Japanese Environmental Musician And Artist

Hiroshi Yoshimura died in 2003, but a series of streaming releases has brought his music to a huge new global audience. - The New York Times

Turns Out A Lot More Women Wrote Medieval Texts Than Some Scholars Believed

“Researchers from the University of Bergen in Norway say their findings suggest that there are enclaves of women scribes that have not yet been identified.” - Hyperallergic

The Tectonics Of The Art World Are Shifting, And Showing At Art Basel Hong Kong

India, in particular, has a growing art scene - and the art fair shows that. - The New York Times

In Vancouver, A Record Shop Owner Finds A Rare Copy Of The Beatles Audition Tape

“It was labelled ‘Beatles 60s demos’ and had been sitting around Neptoon Records, one of Vancouver's most well-known record shops, unplayed. ‘I thought it was just a reel-to-reel tape that somebody had put bootleg things on.’” - CBC

How Snow White Became The Year’s Most Cursed Movie

“How did this bankable story become Disney’s poisoned apple? Snow White has seemed cursed from the start, in part by Disney business logic.” - The Guardian (UK)

In UK Prisons, A Theatre Program Helps Save Lives

That’s what one formerly incarcerated woman says. “This company came into jail and turned, not just my life around, but hundreds of other people’s. … They really, really, did save me.” - BBC

Can Art Survive The Climate Crisis?

L.A. artists have talked about their losses, but “we still have no clear picture of how many artworks by which artists, owned by which collectors, were lost. And it’s entirely possible that the public, and even museums, will not know for many years to come — if ever.” - Washington Post (MSN)

A New Report On The State Of Theatre Isn’t Exactly Reassuring

“None of the indicators show full recovery from pre-pandemic levels. And though the pre-Covid years may look booming in hindsight, many of the issues that have battered the field since 2020 were in fact long-standing and systemic, and are still being worked through.” - American Theatre

The Artists Who Lost Everything In Altadena Wonder What Comes Next

On one street, banding together, “The neighbors plan to present a design package to a contractor, so they can pool resources and access to plumbers and electricians, saving both money and time.” - The New York Times

Valencia’s Annual Burning Of Statues

The burning, called Crema, of hundreds of wood-and-papier-mâché sculptures is the climax of the spring festival called Las Fallas in Spain’s third-largest city. This year’s event is felt to be particularly significant in the wake of deadly floods that struck the region last fall. - AP

We Underestimate The Importance Of Our Ability To Understand Cause and Effect

The human power to view cause-and-effect as part of ‘objective reality’ (a philosophically fraught idea, but for now: the mind-independent world ‘out there’) is so basic, so automatic, that it’s difficult to imagine our experience without it. - Aeon

Meet Idina Menzel’s Latest Broadway Co-Star: A Tree

Stella, as she’s called, is the title character in the new show Redwood, and she has been very carefully designed. - The Christian Science Monitor

Considering The Problematic Revenge Memoir

Admission of desire for revenge on the page also reeks of shame: it’s the thing that every writer—certainly every memoirist—grapples with but generally never talks about. - LitHub

Academic Research Publishers Increasingly Turning To AI To Check Peer Review

In 2024, more than 4,600 academic papers were retracted or otherwise flagged for review, according to the Retraction Watch database; during a six-week span last fall, one scientific journal published by Springer Nature retracted more than 200 articles. - InsideHigherEd

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