“For more than a century, the region around Sidangkou has been a hub of musical instrument manufacturing, including traditional Chinese instruments like the sheng, a reed pipe, and the di, a bamboo flute. Factories in the region now produce thousands of oboes, trumpets and tubas each year. Yet nothing seems to have captured the imagination of people here like the saxophone.”
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We Keep Trying To Get Rid Of Paper. But We’re Addicted To It
Paper has played “an essential role in the development of mankind”. And yet, for decades, civilisation has been trying to develop beyond paper, promoting a paper-free world that will run seamlessly, immaterially on pixels and screens alone. How did paper get here? Where does it go next? For that matter, why is paper – which does its job perfectly well – compelled to keep innovating?
The Black Golden-Age Hollywood Actress Who Could Have Passed For White, But Didn’t
Fredi Washington often did pass for white, especially when traveling in the South, going into whites-only businesses and bringing things out for the likes of Duke Ellington. She often played mixed-race characters, including ones who passed or tried to pass, as in Imitation of Life (1934); she was often turned down for black roles, and when she got one, she had to wear makeup.
Chinese Observer: Is America Going Through Its Own Cultural Revolution? (There Are Signs)
“Virtually all types of institutions, be it political, educational, or business, are exhausting their internal energy in dealing with contentious, and seemingly irreconcilable, differences in basic identities and values — what it means to be American. In such an environment, identity trumps reason, ideology overwhelms politics, and moral convictions replace intellectual discourse.”
In Search Of The Mysterious Author Of A Memoir From Inside The Gulag
“How the diary emerged reads like a detective story, with Zoya Eroshok, a prominent Russian journalist, spending years piecing together the identity of its author and her fate. … [The] diary is believed to be the only one written inside the camps to have survived.”
Pioneering Ceramic Artist Betty Woodman Dead At 87
“Woodman is often associated with the beginning of a trend in the mid-1970s toward raising traditionally low forms of art-making – ones that were not painting, sculpture, drawing, and printing – to the higher status of those other mediums. For Woodman, this was accomplished by radically experimenting with ceramics, in the process alluding to Italian Renaissance, ancient Etruscan, and Chinese styles.” In 2006 she became the first living female artist to get a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum.
Regional Theatre Goes Rogue In Philadelphia
“The Wilma now has a three-year-old resident acting company” – in itself a rarity nowadays – “and welcomes shows whose daring aesthetics depart from the factory-setting naturalism of most American stages, especially regional ones.” And the theater’s model, thoroughly changed from less than a decade ago, was instituted not by a new boss but by longtime artistic director Blanka Zizka.
The Ten Most Important Lost Texts From The Ancient World
From an Indian equivalent of Aesop’s fables to the holy scriptures of Zoroastrianism to an early Chinese encyclopedia to Sappho’s poems.
The Stage 100 For 2018: Britain’s Most Influential Theatre Folk
Vicky Featherstone, artistic director of London’s Royal Court Theatre, “has leapt from last year’s placing of 39th in the annual list, reflecting her ‘brave’ and ‘enlightened’ leadership in the face of allegations around harassment and abuses of power in the theatre industry. … In taking the number one position, Featherstone knocks commercial producer Sonia Friedman off the top of the list to third place.”
San Antonio Symphony Cancels Rest Of Season, ‘Suspends Operations’
“The Symphony Society board met late into Wednesday evening ‘to determine whether there was a path forward for the Symphony Society,’ said Board Chair Alice Viroslav in a statement issued following the meeting … ‘To be clear, this is not the end of the symphony.’ … An attempt on the part of major donors to take over the Symphony’s operations [recently] failed.”