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How The Classical Guitar Becomes One Of The Most Complex Instruments, In A Good Musician’s Hands

“What’s distinctive about the classical guitar is its simplicity. Ultimately, it’s basically a wooden box with strings attached and a fretted neck, a bridge, a saddle, and tuning pegs. Classical guitar has no inbuilt amplification, and the sounds are produced very directly.” - Aeon

What Will This French City Do If Its Famous Comic Book Festival Fails?

Angoulême is where graphic novels and comic books are normally celebrated in a huge festival each year. But maybe not in 2026. “Criticized for financial opacity, harsh management style and the firing of an employee who had filed a rape complaint, the company 9e Art + has found itself cornered on all sides.” - Le Monde English (Archive Today)

Fighting To Save Britain’s First Multiplex Movie Theatre From A Housing Development

“As a shot of commercial and architectural adrenaline, it revived British cinema-going, welcoming more than a million visitors in its first year, and impelling the subsequent proliferation of multiplexes.” - The Guardian (UK)

How Did Tom Stoppard Fund His Playwriting?

Hollywood. “At one point in the early 1990s, Stoppard earned $500,000 for a five-week stretch polishing various projects for Universal Pictures. … He seemed to have a particular fondness for dog movies, contributing to both Beethoven and 102 Dalmatians.” - The New York Times

Ethan Hawke On Playing The 5-Foot-Tall, Combover-Laden Lorenz Hart

“Hawke shaved his head and stood in a trench to appear shorter than his co-stars. This literally gave him a fresh view on the world.” - The Guardian (UK)

Clueless Colleges Are Preparing To Harm Their Students In The Name Of ‘Preparing’ Them For A World Of AI

“Based on the available evidence, the skills that future graduates will most need in the AI era—creative thinking, the capacity to learn new things, flexible modes of analysis—are precisely those that are likely to be eroded by inserting AI into the educational process.” - The Atlantic

Video Games Are Feeding A Deep Well Of Conspiracy Theories

“In the fiction of Assassin’s Creed, humanity is descended from ancient aliens; ... world events influenced by a shadow war between two secret societies; the media exists to manipulate the public. This makes for an exciting series of video games” — but it echoes real-life conspiracy theories. - Slate

Daniel Woodrell, The Author Of Winter’s Bone, Has Died At 72

Woodrell was “a novelist known for prose as rugged and elemental as the igneous rock of the Ozark Mountains, his birthplace, which he returned to just as his artistic craftsmanship peaked.” - The New York Times

The Oxford Word Of The Year Is Probably Something You Experience Every Day

You know what clickbait is, right? Well, the word of the year is its anger-fueled cousin, rage bait, "manipulative tactics used to drive engagement online, with usage of it increasing threefold in the last 12 months.” - BBC

There’s A Lot Of History, And Art, Beyond Art Basel Miami Beach

Getting beyond the tent walls means understanding just how much the Cuban diaspora means to the city. - The New York Times

Why Is A 1998 Musical Resonating With Audiences Now?

“We wrote something, you know, with very open hearts and no political agenda. We just wanted to tell this amazing story, and look what has happened.” - NPR

A Classical Pianist’s Plea To Let Art Be Messy, And Real

"Playing an instrument well is phenomenally difficult. It takes a lifetime of arduous work and can become all-consuming, making it easy to forget that technical mastery is a means to an expressive end, not the goal. … In and of itself, it is uninteresting.” - The New York Times

In The Miserable Economy For Creative People, What Happens When One Is Successful?

In Alison Bechdel’s newest book, “Communal systems of support and shared resources are positioned against the capitalist drive to isolate, hoard resources, and privatize.” - Los Angeles Review of Books

Inside The Philly Traveling Museum Where Black Collectors Have The Spotlight

“It got to the point where I had more art than walls. … I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool for a bunch of collectors to get together and create a space to show our work. Tell our story?’” - Philadelphia Inquirer (MSN)

The Super Weird, Remixed Way People Are Watching Old TV Shows

“People are sitting through one-to-two minute, out-of-order clips of TV shows and movies on social media, awkwardly cropped for the vertical format and often with terrible music blaring in the background.” Okaaaaaay. But the people who love them really love them. - Washington Post (MSN)

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