The author got a seven-figure advance, the first print run is half a million copies, the book jacket features gushing blurbs by famous writers, and the book got loads of coverage in The New York Times. But then the Twitterverse came after it, observers called out plot points that strain credibility, and even Cummins herself said, “I don’t know if I’m the right person to tell this story.” And then Oprah got involved. – Vox
Author: Matthew Westphal
Smart Caption Glasses, A New Way To Make Theatre Accessible To Hearing-Impaired Audiences
“Worn by audience members during a performance, the glasses project dialogue directly onto the lens, allowing the wearer to follow the action without having to glance toward the sides of the stage, where caption screens are usually placed.” – American Theatre
Opera And Classical Young Artist Programs Are Big Business — For Everyone But The Young Artists
Zach Finkelstein: “Company X is a prestigious music apprenticeship festival for instrumentalists and singers. They take in about $15 million a year in revenue, own over $80 million dollars in assets, including real estate, investments, and cash on hand, and pay their CEO almost half a million dollars a year. Nearly two thousand young musicians paid $60 each last year to apply for a handful of spots, with no guarantee of being heard in person. netting the company an estimated $118,000 in application fees. And they pay their newly-hired apprentice performers absolutely nothing.” – The Middle-Class Artist
Could The Dirt-Poor Alabama Hamlet Famous For Its Quilts Become An Art Destination Like Marfa?
“The thinking goes: If Marfa, the pint-size Texas town located a three-hour’s drive from the nearest airport, can become a site for pilgrims seeking to commune with Donald Judd’s Minimalist art, why can’t Gee’s Bend become a magnet for art historians, craft enthusiasts, and American history buffs who want to know more about the source of the world’s most acclaimed quilts?” – artnet
How A Pair Of English Policemen Helped Jump-Start The Movement To Repatriate The Benin Bronzes
In 2004, Steve Dunstone and Timothy Awoyemi, on a Police Expedition Society goodwill trip, were on a boat on the Niger River being greeted by the people of a southern Nigerian town. As the event was ending and the boat was about to leave, one man from the crowd reached out and passed Dunstone a note. It said, “Please help return the Benin Bronzes.” – The New York Times
Knopf Names Sonny Mehta’s Successor As Publisher
Some three-and-a-half weeks after Mehta’s death, the publishing house Alfred A. Knopf has appointed Reagan Arthur, currently senior vice president and publisher at Little, Brown, to succeed him as president and editor in chief. While few people knew this before the announcement, Arthur was Mehta’s own choice for the job. – Los Angeles Times
NEA Releases Results Of Latest Survey Of Public Participation In The Arts
Among the key findings: 74% of American adults engage with the arts via electronic media, 54.3% attend arts events, and 53.7% create or perform art themselves. Three states, D.C. and metro Cleveland have particularly high rates of attendance at performances, while Vermont, Montana, and metro Dallas lead in art show attendance, and nearly 90% of adults in greater Philadelphia and Baltimore engage with the arts via electronic media. – National Endowment for the Arts
PBS News Anchor Jim Lehrer Dead At 85
“While best known for his anchor work [as co-founder of what is now The PBS NewsHour], which he shared for two decades with his colleague Robert MacNeil, Mr. Lehrer moderated a dozen presidential debates and was the author of more than a score of novels, which often drew on his reporting experiences. He also wrote four plays and three memoirs.” – The New York Times
One Of The Last Full-Length Interviews Of Monty Python’s Terry Jones
“The BBC came very close to erasing all of the original Python tapes, at least from the first season. What happened was that we got word from our editor that the BBC was about to wipe all the tapes to use for more ‘serious’ entertainment — ballet and opera and the like. So we smuggled out the tapes and recorded them onto a Philips VCR home system. For a long time, these were the only copies of Python‘s first season to exist anywhere. If these were lost, they were lost for good.” – Vulture
How Ice-T was a mensch
“One of my happiest moments, in my years as a journalist, was when I got Ice-T to stop saying something homophobic and cruel in his live shows.” – Greg Sandow