Like his hero Duke Ellington, he had a gift for reconciling musical experiment with the immediacy of pop, finding freedom in the constraints of a verse-chorus-bridge grammar that might otherwise default to clichés. - The Baffler
What is literary criticism — specifically, the kind of highly specialized, theoretically sophisticated textual readings generated by academic critics — really for? - The New York Times
We have surrendered ourselves to our entertainment. We will become so distracted and dazed by our fictions that we’ll lose our sense of what is real. We will make our escapes so comprehensive that we cannot free ourselves from them. The result will be a populace that forgets how to think... - The Atlantic
Some 60 dancers who fled the war make up The United Ukrainian Ballet. With help from local dance professionals and city officials, the company is based in The Hague. - NPR
Probably. Earlier this week, members of the Ballet Folklórico Nacional Argentino and Compañía Nacional de Danza Contemporánea traveled from Buenos Aires down to Argentina's Base Marambio and performed in snowsuits as the temperature hit 19°F. (It's summer there.) - Buenos Aires Herald
“Theatre is in danger of just being a museum piece – not current and not tackling the things that are going on right now around the world, and that’s really important in order to not become obsolete.” - The Guardian
"Who was Robert Opel, and why did he do what he did? ... Even as Opel's fifteen minutes ticked down, his quest for exposure was just getting started. The Oscars were not his first or his last brush with history, and five years later he'd be dead." - The New Yorker
Tim Jackson co-presented the ’92 season with Jimmy Lyons, who launched the festival with San Francisco Chronicle columnist Ralph J. Gleason in 1958. By 1993, Jackson took over and quickly re-established the reputation of the longest continuously running jazz festival as one of the genre’s pre-eminent events. - San Francisco Chronicle
"(He's) not one of the von Trapps you'd occasionally see performing 'Edelweiss' on Oprah or The View in years past. But ... when journalists wondered what the real von Trapps thought of Carrie Underwood playing Maria ..., Myles was the one who gave them a disapproving quote. This occasionally causes issues." - New York Magazine
In a comically transparent escalation of this anti-intellectual crusade, they are targeting libraries. Worse, they’ve embraced a characteristically cruel approach to doing so: bullying librarians. - The Nation
Composer Emma O'Halloran had had her Uncle Mark adapt two of his scripts, Mary Motorhead and Trade, into librettos to which she's written one-act operas --- and she plans to make it a trilogy. She talks to David Patrick Stearns about the collaboration and about the ways she works. - Musical America
When ratings drop, and with them advertising revenues, correspondents change, anchors change, coverage changes. News, especially but not only cable news, is curated for an audience. So, obviously, is the information published on social media. - The New Yorker
"There were years when it was me shouting into the wind and nobody was really listening. There are more voices now. They've been voices of great renown, and they've definitely been more honest. ... We haven't solved the problem. But at least it's not a secret anymore." - Yahoo! (Los Angeles Times)
"(I was) groping and straining to make sense of Kafka's groping and straining to make sense. Not only could I not always — or even often — be certain that I knew what Kafka meant, I didn't know whether at any given moment he himself knew what he meant." - The New York Times
Cory Doctorow: "Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification." - Pluralistic
