Telling parents you don’t want their kids to have the best possible public schools is never good politics. A full century ago, the most effective school-ban campaign in American history set the pattern: noise, fury, rancor, and fear, but not much change in what schools actually teach. - The Atlantic
This was not some scheme dreamed up by Fox News or Rush Limbaugh or even the Cato Institute: this particular intellectual endeavor goes all the way back to the New Deal and FDR's "Four Freedoms" speech. (The Pilgrims, in this view, were proto-socialists mugged by reality.) - Slate
Drawing on its sports-mad nation's expertise in sports medicine, the Australian Ballet has developed physical therapy techniques to help dancers heal without surgery. In more than 15 years, not one of the company's dancers has had to end a career due to injury. - The Age (Melbourne)
He "galvanized protests against the Vietnam War and started a controversial men’s movement with a best seller that called for a restoration of primal male audacity." - The New York Times
The Catherine Project’s commitment, borne out beautifully by our seminars thus far, is that great books are supremely egalitarian: They move and challenge us all alike. Indeed, what proves great books great is that they’ve stood the test of time. - Hedgehog Review
"What we don’t know — about the lives of our neighbors and fellow citizens and why they think the way they do — is almost as important as what we do know." - The New York Times
Christopher Knight: "Lots of smart people write smart things about art but nobody was a better writer than Dave. ... Hickey, a brilliant and cantankerous wit, wrote for the ear. His work needed reading, not scanning, and rewarded effort with pleasure." - Los Angeles Times
In New York, the arts' elitism "stands in stark contrast to the middle decades of the 20th century, when the city was a haven for cash-strapped artists and New Yorkers across the income spectrum could make and enjoy a wide range of art." - New York Daily News
"To their proponents, they're understated and contemporary, with paint jobs that will take a beating without ever looking dirty. To their detractors, they're unimaginative, historically inaccurate aberrations, the kind of thing an affluent biotech CEO who wears a gray Patagonia fleece vest every day might appreciate." - The Guardian
For quite some time, there’s been an esoteric debate running in intellectual property circles as to whether copyright infringement is best characterized as thievery. - The Hollywood Reporter
The development that really established the seven-day week as insurmountable, David Henkin contends, came in the middle of the twentieth century: the television schedule. - The New Yorker
Historically, in America, the true strength of the Classics and of a Classical education has not been among the elite but among the rising middle class. - Los Angeles Review of Books
"The Antiquities Trafficking Unit is very much a victim of its own success. Set up in 2017 … to curb the smuggling of cultural heritage, it has seized 3,604 illicit items." 2,281 of those are still there; here's a look at eight of them. - The New York Times
It pools 100 medium-sized donation of $1,000 each, with the total amount going to one not-for-profit project. Community projects apply and have their applications assessed by the collective of $1,000 donors, who shortlist and select the successful recipient through democratic vote. - ArtsHub
The museum compares itself to Paris’s Centre Pompidou and New York’s Museum of Modern Art — but it has already moved to censor work as it walks a tightrope between its aspiration to be a world-class institution and the limits on free expression in Hong Kong. - Washington Post
New finds at a remote site that's been identified, dismissed, and re-identified as the Israelite monarch's fabled copper mines have reignited debates about whether David and Solomon could have ruled over a great kingdom when no buildings from their period have ever been found. - Smithsonian Magazine
When you think it’s a Tuesday and it turns out to be Wednesday, you feel disoriented in a way that you don’t typically if you think it’s the 26th and it turns out to be the 27th. That’s the change: the real grip on our time consciousness that the week exerts. - The Atlantic
The bass-baritone has made programming an art in itself, building evenings around a sermon or a Langston Hughes poem, slipping from Bach to jazz to Julius Eastman to plantation chant to R&B to Caroline Shaw. And, writes Alex Ross, he makes all of it matter. - The New Yorker
We have to find a new art and a new psychology to penetrate the apathy and the denial that are preventing us making the changes that are inevitable if our world is to survive. - The Guardian
"In this blog, we first examine the historic impact of COVID on performing arts ticket sales and then we use the data to simulate three plausible 'what-if' scenarios – realistic worst-case, realistic best-case, and idealized best-case – to predict the impact of each scenario on ticket sales." - SMU DataArts
