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How The Scots Language (Aye, It’s A Language) Has Survived Against Enormous Odds

While many people (including more than a few Scottish ones) see the tongue of Robert Burns and Trainspotting as just a thickly accented dialect of English, Scots actually developed independently. (There was no medieval influence from Norman French, for one thing, since William the Conqueror never crossed the border.) But with Scotland having been united with the much larger, richer, more culturally assertive England for several centuries now, Scots came close to being subsumed into English entirely. Yet it has survived, and now it’s even gaining speakers.

Heidi Waleson And Justin Davidson: Why New York City Opera Failed

City Opera faced two major problems. First, by the mid-1990s, the audience that had sustained the company in its early years had gotten considerably older. Younger people were coming in — a thrill-seeking audience, interested in unusual works — but not enough of them. Which brings us to the financial problem. Ticket sales were flat and costs were going up because of inflexible labor contracts. These trends affect companies everywhere.

Defacing ‘Art’ – How Yasmina Reza’s Play Changes With Times And Places

The play has racked up productions in 30 languages and 45 countries in its 24-year history. “What’s so interesting is that, like certain plays by Pinter, perhaps, the play adapts itself to its actors, so it doesn’t seem to matter if you cast it with men in their 60s or their 30s,” says Christopher Hampton, who translated Reza’s French-language script into English.” (While the play’s three characters were originally written as male, “Art” has been performed by women as well.) Elisabeth Vincentelli talks with artists who’ve worked on or in the play about how the piece and the times adapt to each other.

University Presses Are Thriving

As anger spreads over libraries being squeezed by STEM journals from large for-profits, university presses are growing in part by looking beyond a narrow focus on library markets and publishing for new audiences, branching out into crossover titles, supplemental texts, regional books, popular reference works, manifestos, graphic novels, and the like. It’s an entrepreneurial flourishing that engages new readers, creates new communities, and extends the reputation of those universities fortunate enough to have presses.

Interrogating The U.S. Constitution On A Theater Stage

In What the Constitution Means to Me, playwright and performer Heidi Schreck gives the speech she used to give as a high school debater, only to interrupt herself and speak as the adult Schreck about how the U.S. has failed to live up to the ideals in the Constitution and where the document itself falls short. She then ends the performance by debating a current high school debate champion about whether we should keep the Constitution or tear it up and start over. In a Q&A with Slate‘s Sam Adams, Schreck talks about how and why she does it.

An Oral History of Vibe Magazine

“Conceived as a hip-hop magazine by two unlikely parents — the most powerful black record producer in the world, Quincy Jones, at the behest of the most powerful media executive in the world, Steve Ross … [Vibe had] a creed that championed hip-hop but thought broad and wide about the genre’s connections to the past and the future, and its implications for just about every other art and science. … What follows is a selective oral history of the magazine, from its birth and ascent, through its 21st-century transformation into a digital cultural bellwether.”

Jane Fortune, Who Rescued The Works Of Renaissance Florence’s Female Artists, Dead At 76

“She founded a nonprofit foundation called Advancing Women Artists to find and salvage art created by women between the 16th and 20th centuries. Her resurrection of these works, many of them Renaissance treasures lost to history and secreted in Tuscan churches and attics for centuries, earned her, in the Italian press, the nickname ‘Indiana Jane.'”