And not 40-year-olds, y’all. “Truly older characters remain very rare in literature, with around only two to three percent of protagonists aged eighty or above. … highlights a gap in representation for our aging population, but also underscores the attributes that society deems worthy of fiction.” - LitHub
Romero, of course, is known as a director - his most famous movie being Night of the Living Dead. But an archivist working on Romero’s papers “found the manuscript of a sprawling supernatural novel — one Romero had clearly worked on extensively, and apparently in secret.” - The New York Times
“The couple never meant to make political movies, Sanaeeha . ‘But in Iran, everything is political.’” (The issue here? A 70-year-old woman character doesn’t wear hijab … inside her own home.) - The Guardian (UK)
Take Emily in Paris for the most recent, most egregious example: Even in Part 1, “the stories don’t have enough space. When you combine arcs that already aren’t fully developed with multiple new characters and force everything into two chunks of episodes, the result is an incongruity.” - HuffPost
“When we learn something with other people—be it a college study group, a cooking class, or workplace learning—we encode the information more robustly in the brain and feel more motivated to act.” A virtual environment can substitute, but basically, humans learn better with each other. - Fast Company
"In the statement announcing her death, DePrince is described as ‘a beacon of hope for many, showing that no matter the obstacles, beauty and greatness can rise from the darkest of places.’” - NPR
Some of the fiction nominees are also on the Booker Prize Longlist, but this list adds many others, including short story collections, as well. - Washington Post (MSN)
While same-sex pairings aren't unusual in contemporary dance or in abstract ballets, they're almost never seen even in new narrative ballets. With this new work about Oscar Wilde, commissioned by David Hallberg for the Australian Ballet, Wheeldon fills that gap — and considers just how much can be shown onstage. - The Guardian
I have come to believe it will take many, many thousands, maybe even millions of robots doing stuff in the real world to collect enough data to train e2e models that make the robots do anything other than fairly narrow, well-defined tasks. - Wired
The worry is that our remembrance will whittle down Jones’s vast career—spanning sixty years and encompassing more than two hundred turns in the theatre, on film, and on television—to, as with Plutarch’s nightingale picked clean, vox et praeterea nihil: a voice and nothing more. - The New Yorker
Over the last several decades, a quiet revolution has taken place in American fiction: The novels recognized by major literary prizes have largely abandoned the present in favor of the past. Contemporary fiction has never been less contemporary. - The Nation
Here's a look at the enormous development in the field since the 1980s, including the spread of cultural tourism far beyond the big cities, the increasingly active participation of indigenous Australians, and why the arts and tourism need each other and must work together. - ArtsHub (Australia)
The Pitlochry “theatre in the hills” is known for its unique ensemble and repertory practice: across the summer season actors appear in three or four daily changing productions, learning the parts simultaneously. - The Guardian
She earned money by writing and reading letters for illiterate neighbors in their village, and Pedrito noticed that what Mama said aloud didn't always match what was written in the letters — she improvised things to make the recipient happy. Years later he recognized the huge lesson she was teaching him. - The Guardian
