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An Open Letter To New York City Ballet Dancers Supporting Peter Martins

Former NYCB corps member Sophie Flack: “I have known some of you for a long time, so I’m telling you this as a friend: by posting on social media your sadness for Peter’s downfall, you are siding with an abuser. You are discrediting the men and women who’ve come forward, an extraordinarily difficult thing to do outside the ballet world, and career suicide when it’s done while still ‘inside.’ Even if you were to discredit each and every allegation, Peter’s documented crimes are inarguable, and would be fireable offences in any other setting.”

Soprano Lisette Oropesa Says She Was Denied Roles Because She Was Too Fat

“That’s why I lost weight … If you’re singing repertoire that only two other people in the world sing, congratulations, you’ve won the voice lottery! You can sing anywhere you want, you can write your own checks. But there are a million Norinas and Adinas and Lucias, so it’s much more competitive. There are roles I wasn’t even considered for because of the way I looked. I thought that I’d worked way too hard and was singing far too well (I believed) to be stopped before I could even enter the room. Someone would look at my photograph and say, ‘No. Too fat!’ It ain’t right, but it’s life.”

Alitalia’s Destruction Of Centuries-Old Viola Da Gamba Makes World News

Traveling from Rio de Janeiro to Tel Aviv via Rome, Myrna Herzog was told that there was no room in the cabin for her 17th-century instrument and she’d have to gate-check it. (The airline says Herzog declined the chance to purchase a seat for the gamba; she denies this.) She went public with photos of the damage, and the story has hit major newspapers in Europe as well as The Daily Mail and Fox News.

Twenty Modiglianis Seized From Exhibition In Italy Are Definitely Fake

“[The] paintings seized by Italian police last summer from an exhibition of works by Amedeo Modigliani held in Genoa are forgeries, according to Isabella Quattrocchi, an independent expert appointed by Italian prosecutors to assess the images. The show at the Palazzo Ducale closed three days early last July after the Genoa state prosecutor ordered the seizure of 21 alleged fakes.”

Young Adult Author Kathleen Karr Dead At 71

“[She] sailed the Nile, learned to box and ensconced herself in library archives to research humorous, frequently suspenseful novels about pioneer girls heading West, ‘turkeypokes’ herding poultry, a grave-robbing phrenologist and – told from a camel’s point of view – an Army experiment in the West Texas desert.”

Why Critics Fail When They Aren’t Critical Enough

Here’s the heart of the problem: The set of critics’ and audiences’ interests do not perfectly overlap but rather form a Venn diagram. In the audience circle, the pressing question is, “Should I spend some number of the dollars I have to my name and the hours I have left on Earth on this thing?” Critics get in for free and by definition have to read or watch or listen to whatever’s next up. So their circle is filled with relativistic questions about craft and originality and wallet quality and the often unhelpfully general “Is it good?” (Some of them even have an idea of what they mean by “good”; the rest are winging it.)