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Chicago Theater “Has To Stop Eating Its Own”: Chris Jones

"What matters now is whether this community can rebuild itself with fewer takedowns and more inclusion, less intramural finger-pointing and more outward-facing togetherness. Above all, end the canard that you can only reform an organization by ripping it apart, at least until it offers you a paycheck." - MSN (Chicago Tribune)

We Need To Redefine What It Means To Be A Citizen

In this future, people are citizens, rather than subjects or consumers. With this identity, it becomes easier to see that all of us are smarter than any of us. And that the strategy for navigating difficult times is to tap into the diverse ideas, energy and resources of everyone. - BBC

Eighty Percent Of Younger Viewers Keep Subtitles Turned On. Why?

A study last November found that four out of five viewers aged between 18 and 25 said they use subtitles “all or part of the time” compared with only a quarter of those aged between 56 and 75. - The Guardian

Professional Theater Has Been Endangering Its Actors, Literally, For Generations. Now Actors Are Finally Pushing For Safety.

"In return for the privilege of scraping by in a field they love, they are commonly expected to endanger themselves physically and emotionally." Long hours, exhaustion, even severe injury.  Post-pandemic, some are insisting that it doesn't have to be this way.  (Others insist it does.) - The New York Times

When Buckminster Fuller Met Steve Jobs

Fuller had devoted his career to predicting the impact of technology, but he saw nothing special in Apple: “I remember him saying that he thought the computer was a toy.” - Fast Company

Trying To Figure Out The Sexual-Abuse Scandal At Boston Ballet (Which Doesn’t Involve The Company At All)

The accusations are by ex-students of former principal ballerina Dusty Buttons and, especially, her husband. Gretchen Voss spent months investigating the case: "I made breakthroughs with my reporting that I didn't fully expect, with consequences I didn't expect, either. The more I learned, the more elusive the truth became." - Boston Magazine

The Death Of London’s Great Orchestra Festival

The death sentence was delivered by the BBC’s director general, Tim Davie, in a statement terminating BBC Four, which televises most of the Proms, and urging the BBC’s six orchestras in London, Manchester, Scotland and Wales to look for “alternative sources of income where possible.” - The Critic

That Seems… So Normal. But Who Defines Normal?

How does such a tiny group dominate what we think of as normality? With meticulous research, Sarah Chaney traces the history of such narratives back to the year 1800, when the word “normal” was simply a mathematical term designating a line at a right angle. - The Guardian

How TikTok Is Vanquishing Facebook And Twitter

Pseudo-monopolies of this type cannot last forever. The past decade has been good for these social-media giants, but the sudden ascent of TikTok might turn out to be the disruption that finally ends their reign. - The New Yorker

Inside The Bitter Battle Over Dividing Streaming Revenue

This uneven division of the revenue was originally calculated to account for the expenses that labels incurred in the manufacture and distribution of vinyl, CDs and cassette tapes. That lopsided split may or may not still make sense in the streaming age, depending on whom you ask. - Variety

Reality Has Become A Game Played Online

What we haven’t figured out how to make sense of yet is the fun that many Americans act like they’re having with the national fracture. - The New Atlantis

The Co-opting Of Art In A Changing World

“Our art has become exhaustively political, but it is no longer discernibly subversive,” observed the writer Greg Jackson about the literature of the Trump years, “It is what major cultural institutions, foundations, and media organizations find congenial.” - Liberties Journal

New Canadian Radio Format Focuses On Audience And Wins Listeners

Key to Conversation Radio's success is the higher level of interaction between hosts and the audience. “The hosts skilled in storytelling, the life of a party but not the center of attention – the audience is always the center of attention.” - Inside Radio

Mexican Town Sets Off Debate About Authentic Culture And Branding

The decree has generated conversations in the tourist-heavy, gentrifying borough about history, art, and the effects of globalization: How should a city balance the need for a general sense of cleanliness and order with calls to preserve tradition and culture? - Christian Science Monitor

Minnesota Orchestra Goes Nordic (Again) For Its Next Music Director

"The 52-year-old Danish conductor Thomas Søndergård succeeds — and bears some resemblance to — Osmo Vänskä, a Finnish conductor who, at age 48, arrived in Minnesota by way of Scotland with a history of Sibelius recordings, a lively podium presence and unruly hair." - The Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

The Trap Of Being Over-Informed

The demand to “stay informed” creates and nurtures that feeling of helplessness. By now, it’s common knowledge that social media is exquisitely crafted to make people feel terrible, but it’s also being increasingly recognized that mainstream news media is just as bad. - 3 Quarks Daily

One of the Most Controversial Movies Of The 1970s,”Deliverance”, At 50

"(It's) a powerful exploration of the harshness of the rural landscape, with an ecological message that still resonates. ... In many ways, it defined a particular branch of US cinema – one that became particularly popular in the 1970s, and expressed an abject fear of those who lived outside of cities." - BBC

Gopnik: Remembering Claes Oldenburg

Oldenburg had his avant-garde moment. One of the three saints of the first rise of Popism in the United States, alongside Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, he was, in a way, the odd man out among them. - The New Yorker

The End Of Individual Authorship?

Authorship as we know it — that is, singular, capital-A Authority — will become narratively obsolete. It won’t die, or disappear, but merely get integrated into a massive hive mind, a great narrative-making machine (“The newspaper is the sea; literature flows into it at will”). - LA Review of Books

Conductor Collapses From Podium And Dies In Munich

Stefan Soltesz, an Austrian conductor, was near the end of the first act of Richard Strauss' The Silent Woman at the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich when he fell from the podium. One opera director collaborator said, "In a world of dilettantes, he was the real thing." - The New York Times
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