Though “Asian fantasy” has been exploding in popularity as a sub-genre of science fiction and fantasy, not all authors think that’s a good categorization. R.F. Kuang, of the tremendous The Poppy War trilogy, says the name “doesn’t really make a lot of sense, either as a literary category or as an identity category. Obviously, there are a lot of different things that fall under the subcategory of Asian, including East Asian, including South Asians, Southeast Asian, Pacific Islander, for example. … So when we call works just blanket ‘Asian,’ that belies an entire world of difference.” – NPR
How Atlas Obscura Is Decolonizing — No, Enhancing — Its Content
“The Internet’s favorite catalog of weird places” (as the headline fittingly describes it) is going through what it’s calling (for lack of a term that’s both better and more timely) a “decolonization project” — reviewing its thousands of listings and hundreds of articles to include the roles and viewpoints of Black, indigenous, and and other Americans traditionally overlooked. But, says editorial director Samir S. Patel, “decolonizing” isn’t the right word: “Decolonization suggests removal, and that’s not what we’re doing. Adding this kind of perspective to travel and travel writing makes it less boring.” – The New York Times
Lois Ehlert, Illustrator Of Colorful Books Like Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, 86
Ehlert created 38 books for young children as an author and illustrator. Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, which she illustrated with her signature collages, has sold more than 12 million copies since its publication. She was a Caldecott winner for the 1997 board book Color Zoo. “Her workday, she said, was a never-ending series of paper cuts.” – The New York Times
Opera Singer Adrian Angelico Says The Art Form Helped Him Come Out As Trans
Angelico specializes in trousers (or pants, in the US) roles. He says that one day, he finished a rehearsal at covent Garden and realized that he couldn’t play the role of a woman offstage anymore. “The art of opera has always had an appreciation of gender fluidity – and it allowed Adrian to perform as a man onstage before he realised that this was how he wanted to live offstage too.” – BBC
New Research Says That Sleep Evolved Before Brains
This is an entirely new concept for many researchers. “For more than a century, researchers who study sleep have looked for its purpose and structure in the brain. They have explored sleep’s connections to memory and learning. They have numbered the neural circuits that push us down into oblivious slumber and pull us back out of it. They have recorded the telltale changes in brain waves that mark our passage through different stages of sleep and tried to understand what drives them. Mountains of research and people’s daily experience attest to human sleep’s connection to the brain. But a counterpoint to this brain-centric view of sleep has emerged.” – Wired
Can The Movies Recover From The Pandemic?
Well, A Quiet Place II‘s boffo box office seems to indicate that people are sick of their living rooms and, one hopes, fully vaccinated and ready to go to the movies. – Variety
Forget Art And Gems, The Real Money’s In The Library
How many archives are being plundered for private profit? Probably quite a few – and only librarians and academics seem to care. – The Daily Beast
The Specialized Bacteria Cleaning Michelangelo’s Masterpieces
A top-secret project made the Medici Chapel gleam anew: “In the months leading up to Italy’s Covid-19 epidemic and then in some of the darkest days of its second wave as the virus raged outside, restorers and scientists quietly unleashed microbes with good taste and an enormous appetite on the marbles, intentionally turning the chapel into a bacterial smorgasbord.” – The New York Times
A Sound Check In Inglewood
How’d the dry run for the YOLA concert hall go? “It would be hard to imagine a less proper acoustic assessment, or a better real world one. The ensemble of student string players spent the pandemic practicing at home and taking instruction via Zoom. Yet their assignment, on only their third time back together, was the tricky first movement of Bach’s Fourth ‘Brandenburg’ Concerto. This also happened to be their introduction to a new hall with a startlingly lively presence unlike any venue they’d ever experienced.” – Los Angeles Times
Barcelona’s City Council Rejects A Proposed Branch Of The Hermitage
It’s not a simple no, however: “The port authority, which owns the site of the proposed museum, gave the green light but the council has objected on the grounds of location and fears the scheme will provide little value to local residents.” – The Guardian (UK)
The Food Design Of Mare Of Easttown
Honestly, among fans, the food is famous. “HBO is aware of the series’ reputation, and continues to tweet things like ‘The Mare of Easttown food pyramid: fries, peanut butter, spray cheese, vitamins, and beer’ while legions of fans have taken to kicking back on Sunday nights with Rolling Rock and cheesesteaks.” – Salon
A Choreographer Finds Her Voice
Leslie Cuyjet has recently created a dance “so conceptual and personal. Moriah Evans and Yve Laris Cohen — who curate Dance and Process, an incubator that affords choreographers the space and time to develop work — were impressed. Evans said she admired the nuances of seemingly simple gestures in the piece, as well as its ‘delicate shifts,’ which ‘contain all the complexity that I think is within Leslie as a person and as a performer: the subtlety, the control, but also the anger, the rage, the freedom.'” – The New York Times
The Washington State Choir Whose Rehearsal Proved Singing Can Be A Superspreader Event Wants To Sing Again
To be fair, the Skagit Valley Chorale (the one where 52 of 61 singers eventually got COVID from a single rehearsal in March 2020) is singing together now – over Zoom. But a planned return in the fall looks bumpy, thanks to politics around vaccine requirements. – NPR
Call My Agent’s Liliane Rovere Explains How Her Life Created Her Character
Rovère’s character “Arlette has struck a chord as everyone’s ideal disreputable aunt with a repertoire of outrageous stories that she just might tell if the burgundy is flowing. She is the sly, sharp-tongued doyenne of top Paris talent agency ASK, who knows where the bodies are buried, and just when to dig them up.” But her character is more than a little bit made of the 88-year-old actress: “The writers decanted a lot of Rovère into the character – her love of jazz and movies, her partiality to the odd joint, her romance with [Chet] Baker.” – The Observer (UK)
How Hollywood Has Avoided Telling The Story Of The Massacre Of Black Tulsa
We don’t avoid telling stories about difficult topics. “There have been numerous movies about slavery, about Jim Crow, about the Vietnam War. There have even been movies about America’s inaction to the genocide in Rwanda, a story whose national footprint is likely much smaller than that of the Tulsa massacre’s. Yet when it comes to the more than 30 race-related massacres that occurred in this country between 1917-1921, even before the one in Tulsa, there has only been one movie made: John Singleton’s 1997 Rosewood, about the 1923 race massacre that destroyed the town of Rosewood, Florida.” We need more. – Slate