"The news is not very good," goes part of his answer, given last month in his acceptance speech for the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. "If my work has been influenced by fables," he continued later, "there is also something decidedly fabulist about a peace prize." - The New Yorker
"Serop Simonian, the alleged leader of a suspected Egyptian antiquities trafficking ring, was arrested in Germany and transferred to France. … The 80-year-old dealer is believed to be behind the sale of smuggled Egyptian antiquities to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Louvre Abu Dhabi for a collective €60 million." - ARTnews
"A standard component in Egyptian elite burials, the Book of the Dead was not a book in the modern sense of the term but a compendium of some 200 ritual spells and prayers, with instructions on how the deceased’s spirit should recite them in the hereafter." - The New York Times
After all, Bach knew nothing of Halloween, and to him the organ was an instrument for church worship. (Never mind the fact that some musicologists don't think it was Bach who wrote the piece.) No, the spooky associations of the music come straight from Hollywood. - The Conversation
Suddenly, this story broke and everything we believed about her was called into question. There was no warning and no sensitivity to the impact it would have on Indigenous peoples. This is not how reconciliation is done. - The Conversation
It outlines a future “community-based” and “scholar-led” open-research communication system in which publishers are no longer gatekeepers that reject submitted work or determine first publication dates. Instead, authors would decide when and where to publish the initial accounts of their findings, both before and after peer review. - Nature
In the conglomerate era, authors like Stephen King and Danielle Steel are pressured to become advertisements for themselves, even as much of the work of authorship (the research, the fact-checking) is farmed out to a small army of aides, assistants and publicists, leaving writers with less control over their output. - Washington Post
In the past 16 months, seven publishers crossed the one million subscriber mark to enter Press Gazette’s ranking for the first time – including the accounts for opinion-led UK broadcaster GB News and global TalkTV programme Piers Morgan Uncensored. - Press Gazette
I have been told that staff, tasked to phone up lifelong supporters and subscribers who didn’t renew for the first time, had to be given counselling after hearing the harrowing explanations they were told for why. - The Stage
Six-thirty may not be a traditional starting time for theatre. But then in the 16th and early 17th-century, before the advent of the indoor playhouse, afternoon performances were the norm; in the interwar-period 8.30pm was common. - The Stage
Georgette Heyer's 1950 novel The Grand Sophy isn't exactly The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but it definitely includes antisemitic language. That's been edited out in a new edition. Is that sensitivity to today's readers or bowdlerization? - The New York Times
The podcast market is increasingly interested only in those that take the listener on a journey from one episode to the next. Without a throughline, listeners stick with your documentary only if they’re already invested in the issue. - Current
"These AI ad-generation products are less visible to regular users than, for example, an Instagram bot pretending to be Tom Brady. ... But they’re also clearer in purpose and tell us a lot about what sorts of problems these companies think generative AI can solve — for them, anyway." - MSN (New York Magazine)
Acts of disengagement are routinely met with scepticism, judgment and pushback in public discourse. What if we were to treat them instead as opportunities for open enquiry and ask what is to be gained by them? - Aeon
That's the gambit being tried with a new adaptation, co-directed by Tony Goldwyn and Savion Glover, that's getting a five-day run in New York this week. (Another change: the addition of tap-dancing ancestral spirits called the Griots.) - The New York Times
