“The 83-person staff of Gimlet Media, a podcasting startup acquired by music streaming service Spotify for $230 million in February, is unionizing with the Writers Guild of America, East (WGAE). Gimlet was founded in 2014 and produces popular podcasts including Reply All, StartUp, and Crimetown.” – BuzzFeed
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Another Casualty Of Government Shutdown: Smithsonian’s Folklife Festival
“The Smithsonian Institution has canceled this summer’s 10-day Folklife Festival celebrating the music and culture of Benin and Brazil and will replace it with a smaller event.” Instead, “[there] will be a two-day event, June 29 and 30, focused on the ‘Social Power of Music,’ in keeping with the Smithsonian-wide 2019 Year of Music theme.” – The Washington Post
Vivian Cherry, 98, Photographic Poet Of New York Street Scenes
“[Her] curiosity about people’s lives, inspired by the artistry of photographers like Dorothea Lange, Helen Levitt and Paul Strand, brought her to the city’s streets to take finely observed pictures of immigrants, street vendors, bocce players, construction workers, fruit auctioneers, farriers shoeing Central Park carriage horses, and children watching in amazement as an airplane flew overhead.” – The New York Times
For First Time, English National Ballet Hires Staff Medical Director To Care For Dancers
“The company, led by Tamara Rojo, has hired Andy Reynolds in the new role, which will see him lead a team comprising a company doctor, physiotherapist, and a masseur and acupuncturist. Reynolds joins ENB from Harlequins Rugby Club, where he was head of medical services.” – The Stage
The First Women-Only Club For Arts Workers Is Key For Overcoming Inequality In Industry, Says Founder
Joanna Payne, founder and director of the London club called Marguerite: “In an ideal world, we wouldn’t need all-female spaces of any kind … But [for] all the time that the ‘ideal world’ is still very much just that, I think that we do.” – London Evening Standard
All Of Germany’s States Agree To Start Repatriating Looted Items In Museums
“The culture ministers of Germany’s 16 states agreed to create conditions for the repatriation of artifacts in public collections that were taken ‘in ways that are legally or morally unjustifiable today’ from former colonies, describing their return as ‘an ethical and moral duty.'” – The Art Newspaper
The International Campaign To Rebuild And Restock The Mosul University Library
With well over half a million books in Arabic and more than one million antique maps, documents, and other materials (including a 9th-century Quran), the library was one of the most important in the Middle East — until ISIS began its destruction while it occupied the city (2014-17). Now the NGO Book Aid International and a project called the Mosul Book Bridge are gradually undoing the damage. – Publishing Perspectives
Netflix Agrees To Remove Footage Of Real Train Derailment From “Bird Box”
People in a Quebec town and across the province were shocked after learning in January that footage from a derailment and explosion that killed 47 people was used in the drama starring Sandra Bullock. – Toronto Star
The World’s First Virtual Reality Theatre Service
The platform, called LIVR, aims to make theatre “more accessible to all” by giving users a “fully immersive 360-degree experience” of live performance from their homes. Subscribers can stream shows using a mobile phone app for LIVR and watch them via a free virtual reality headset that is provided by the service. – The Stage
Books Need Readers To Be Books. But What About The Quality Of The Reader?
To exist as a book, the pages with their letters and spaces need a reader. We may think of books as unchanging material objects, but they only, as it were, happen when read; they have no absolute identity. And the nature of that reading—an experience extended over many hours, then mulled over for many more, for the book does not cease to happen the moment we turn the last page—will depend, to a large degree, on who the reader is. – New York Review of Books