From a very early age, dancers are taught that pain comes with the territory. “Dance is not natural. We’re stretching our bodies to extremes.” Think of a young, impressionable dancer developing their splits or breaking in pointe shoes for the first time—basically everything hurts. - Dance Magazine
Some 90% of the world’s data has been created in the last 2 years alone. In total, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every day, with the number continuing to grow. Yet while the amount of data that we produce has grown exponentially, our understanding of how to manage it has not. - VentureBeat
"(He) overcame an impoverished background in the Bahamas … to rise to the top of his profession at a time when prominent roles for Black actors were rare. … At the same time, as the lone Black leading man in 1960s Hollywood, he came under tremendous scrutiny." - CNN
For five years, someone has been impersonating various publishing industry figures (dozens of them) in order to obtain not-yet-published manuscripts — which were never posted online or held for ransom, baffling people in the field. The suspect is Filippo Bernardini, a young employee of Simon & Schuster. - Vulture
Researchers at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland trained the software on topographical scans of paintings (rather than the high-resolution digital images more commonly used) and found that it could match painting to artist with 96% accuracy. - The Art Newspaper
Now that we have more storytelling than ever, has empathy increased apace? If stories have such sunny effects, why has the big bang of storytelling coincided with an explosive growth of hostility and polarization rather than harmony and connection? - Boston Globe
Why are composers like Mozart, Beethoven and Bach widely regarded as the greatest of all time? Why is it that in a 1985 survey of art experts by the Illustrated London News, only 2 of the 20 greatest paintings of all time were from the 20th century, one from the 18th century, and none at all from the 19th century? - EconLib
“The attention paid by the game developers and their historical consultants to details of both the actual and social geography of these urban settings produced one of the most authentic depictions of eighteenth-century life in popular culture”—far more historically accurate than Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton. - Lapham's Quarterly
For years, aesthetes and directors of development have been frustrated by the lack of interest that software industry execs have shown in directing their charitable donations to the arts. In the Bay Area, that has started to change. - San Francisco Chronicle
For Hollywood studios, 2021 was a year of great experimentation and the rare chance to relentlessly test movie distribution patterns in ways they had salivated over prior to the pandemic. - Variety
"The public continued to interrogate museums over their treatment of workers, their attachments to patrons with problematic sources of wealth, and their dragon-like hold on items of questionable provenance." And then there's Hunter Biden … - Artnet
"Vulture's theater desk, Helen Shaw and Jackson McHenry, discuss the 2021 version, how it alters a hugely familiar piece of art, and how and where those changes worked." - Vulture
Sorted into categories such as "Missing masterpieces", "Ancient art", "Prehistoric peoples", African-American and indigenous North American history, and "Royal treasures", here are nearly a hundred pieces of (mostly) good news. - Smithsonian Magazine
Seeing Chuck’s image reduced to the accusations against him in recent years has inspired me to tell my story, not as a defense or rebuttal — I believe and honor the women who came forward — but to add perspective to how we see Chuck Close, even if that portrait is more Cubist than photorealist. - The New York Times
The way the idea of giving up figures in our lives, as a perpetual lure and an insistent fear. The giving up that involves leaving ourselves out of what we had wanted, or thought we had wanted. The giving up that is linked to a sense of impossibility, or of possibilities running out. - London Review of Books
As cast members test positive for the new coronavirus variant and have to isolate, these under-recognized performers — many of whom must master two or three roles which they have little chance to rehearse — make the difference between the show going on and getting cancelled. - The New York Times
The 26-foot-tall artwork, known as the “Pillar of Shame,” had stood at the University of Hong Kong for nearly a quarter-century and honored the hundreds, if not thousands, of students and others killed on June 4, 1989, when the Chinese military crushed pro-democracy protests. - Washington Post
The program consistently ranked as one of the top five graduate acting schools in the country, after more than five decades educating such distinguished alumni as Denzel Washington, Anna Deavere Smith, Annette Bening, Elizabeth Banks and Anika Noni Rose. - San Francisco Chronicle
