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When Hoop Skirts Were New, Women Actually Saw Them As Liberating

“It’s true: The hoop skirt has aged poorly. Its connotations 150 years post-heyday are antiquated at best, antagonistic at worst. From an inside view, though, this ‘choreography of exclusion’ was anything but. Just the opposite, in fact: Its rebellion was quiet, subdued, and feminine, but a rebellion nonetheless. The skirts have lived long enough to become a villain of our racial imagination. To the women who wore them, they were heroic.”

A New Translation Of The New Testament Aims To Be As Messy As The Original

“The New Testament, after all, is not a store of ancient wonders like the Hebrew Bible. It’s a grab bag of reportage, rumor, folk memory, and on-the-hoof mysticism produced by regular people, everyday babblers and clunkers, under the pressure of a supremely irregular event – namely, the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. So that, says [David Bentley] Hart, is what it should sound like.” (“Where an author has written bad Greek, writes Hart, “I have written bad English.”)

Neil LaBute, Katori Hall, Quiara Alegría Hudes, And Other Playwrights On How They Think Of Audiences

Hudes: “If you write solely to suit the audience, you’ll be chasing your tail. That being said, I study them very closely – where they laugh, where they lean in, where they ‘go fishing’ in their minds.”
LaBute: “I want to get close to them and make them feel the events in a real way – to break the fourth wall, to look them squarely in the eye, and challenge them to leave, but force them to stay.”

Four Factors Make The Classical Music World Ripe For Sexual Abuse

“Classical music institutions like the Met don’t have to dig very deep in order to understand where things went wrong. Through decades of research, the National Sexual Violence Resource Center – which rose out of the feminist rape crisis movement of the 1970s – has identified five problematic norms that contribute to an environment in which sexual violence takes place. As a workplace and as an art form, classical music is at risk in four of them.”

Dances With Wheelchairs: Inside AXIS, The Company That Puts Disabled And Able-Bodied Dancers Side By Side

“Making the case for a serious art form for dancers who use wheelchairs meant a lot of advocacy. … ‘The first 10 years we spent just trying to convince people in the bigger dance world, the funding world, that what we were doing wasn’t ‘just therapy,” [said AXIS co-founder Judith Smith]. ‘We really wanted to be taken seriously as a dance company.’ … Today, AXIS’s work is fairly well known within the field of contemporary dance. It is less visible, however, to the general public for many reasons.”

Why The Getty Center’s Art Was Safest Inside The Getty, No Matter How Close The Fires Got

“Visitors come to the Getty Center in Los Angeles to see Vincent van Gogh’s irises and other great works. What they don’t see is the reason that these masterpieces could stay put while thousands in Southern California had to evacuate as multiple fires raged in recent days, one of which came within thousands of feet of the museum. The Getty’s architect, Richard Meier, built fire resistance into the billion-dollar complex.”

‘Game Of Thrones’ Tourists Are Devouring Dubrovnik

“Since 2011, when the show first premiered on HBO, tourism in Dubrovnik has seen an increase of 9 to 12 percent annually” – with numbers up to 10,000 or more a day, over 1 million a year in a town of 43,000 people. “While the show’s notoriety is good news for Dubrovnik’s economy, 80 percent of which relies on tourism, UNESCO has warned that Old Town Dubrovnik, a World Heritage Site, cannot accommodate this crush of newcomers. Some residents have had enough, too.”