“[He] was a master of shaggy-dog stories set on the American frontier or just beyond the Southern border, where his characters journeyed to recoup a debt, mete out justice or track down a runaway spouse. … By 1998, when author and journalist Ron Rosenbaum called him ‘our least-known great novelist,’ four of his five books were out of print.” – The Washington Post
Art Critic Christopher Knight Wins Lifetime Achievement Award
It’s the second Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation award and comes with a $50,000 prize. Knight has been an art critic at The Times since 1989, where he continues to chronicle the growth of Southern California’s visual art scene. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism in 1991, 2001 and 2007, and he received the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award for art and design criticism last year. – Los Angeles Times
Ten Trends That Will Impact The Arts Says Americans For The Arts
The arts advocacy group says these are the trends that will inform its work over the next few years. – Americans for the Arts
Forgers And The True Believers That Want To Believe Them
Perhaps the forger’s best tool is the desire of buyers to want something to be real. No matter how improbable. – The Daily Beast
How Musicians Are Starting To Grapple With The Climate Impact Of Touring
“It seems to me that the only solution commensurate with the scale of the problem is fundamentally changing the way musicians work. We have to stop seeing it as reasonable that we’d play in Barcelona one day, London the next, and New York two days later. And stop seeing it as reasonable that, at a big festival in Barcelona, fifty thousand out of the hundred thousand people there have flown from the U.K. to attend.” – The New Yorker
Boy Scouts Of America Files For Bankruptcy
The organization has about half the members it did in the 1970s. But it has failed to address claims of sexual abuse for decades, and the claims have mounted up. The bankruptcy is an attempt to deal with some of the settlements. – The New York Times
More Than Numbers: How Astronomers Named The Planets And Stars
As the Shakespeare scholar Todd Borlik has pointed out, the triumph of Romanticism throughout Europe by the mid-1800s meant that Shakespeare (though not so much Pope) was seen as a universal rather than particularly English genius. Because of the Bard’s immense cultural appeal during this period, Herschel’s suggested names transcended cultural or nationalistic boundaries and allowed him the opportunity, whether he intended it or not, to enshrine English literature around the planet first named for an English king. – Aeon