“The Gjellestad site is the home of the Jell Mound—one of the largest Iron Age burial grounds in Scandinavia. A landowner first discovered it in 2017 when requesting permission to build drainage ditches across the field near the mound, with experts confirming the find in autumn 2018.” – The Art Newspaper
Blog
Wall Street Ponders Implications Of “Wonder Woman” Release
“This is an unprecedented move for a major Hollywood media company, especially for a $200 million film, and a grand experiment that could have long-lasting implications if successful,” Credit Suisse analyst Douglas Mitchelson wrote in a report. – The Hollywood Reporter
Beirut’s Cultural Community Struggles To Rebuild After Last Summer’s Explosion
“With no support from the government, a collapsed economy that has made financial hardship a normal part of life, and a spike in coronavirus cases that has overloaded hospitals, the Lebanese have been left to fend for themselves, rebuilding and reconstructing their beloved city with grit and determination.” – Artnet
The Great American Essays
“We’re going through a particularly rich time for American essays: especially compared to, 20 years ago, when editors wouldn’t even dare put the word “essays” on the cover, but kept trying to package these variegated assortments as single-theme discourses, we’ve seen many collections that have been commercially successful and attracted considerable critical attention.” – LitHub
Why Election Conspiracy Beliefs Are Ripe Right Now
“More and more we view opposing partisans as alien to ourselves, dislike and distrust them, and see them as iniquitous. “Viewing opposing partisans as different, or even as dislikable or immoral, may not be problematic in isolation,” the researchers write. “But when all three converge, political losses can feel like existential threats that must be averted—whatever the cost.” Which of course includes alleging that elections are rigged.” – Nautilus
‘Marge Vs. The Monorail’: An Oral History Of Maybe The Greatest ‘Simpsons’ Episode Ever
“Featuring parodies of The Flintstones, The Music Man and several disaster movies, as well as a family of possums and some memorable lines from guest star Leonard Nimoy, ‘Marge vs. the Monorail’ helped to chart a new course for The Simpsons. … Twenty-seven years on from when it first aired, five key figures involved in making the episode shared their memories of creating a classic.” – Vice
Defining Creativity (And How To Look For It)
Modern psychology’s approach to creativity was born in 1950, but it was the Sputnik shock of 1957 that turned attention to the role that creativity plays in the real world. Over the following decades, psychologists would come to understand that creativity is not merely a matter of how we think, but also a function of our personalities (some people are inclined to be more open-minded than others) and where we work or learn (some environments are more conducive to creativity than others, for example through encouraging free thinking). – Psyche
The Opera That Changed Everything: Mark Swed On ‘Einstein On The Beach’
“Almost nothing about what composer Philip Glass and director Robert Wilson put onstage was opera. Einstein has no narrative. Einstein has no Einstein, even though a great many onstage are dressed in the iconic image of frizzy-haired scientist. Einstein on the Beach has no beach. … Everything about [the piece] seemed new and revelatory in 1976. … When the Metropolitan Opera presented the touring production that fall after an ecstatic European tour, in which every seat at every performance was sold out, the company hadn’t performed a new American work in decades. Here was a new beginning for opera in America.” – Los Angeles Times
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Bids To Buy Iconic Simon & Schuster
The powerhouse publisher was put up for sale by its owner, ViacomCBS, in March, and the company has since fielded more than half a dozen inquiries, according to three people familiar with the process who declined to be named because the matter remains confidential. – The New York Times
How To Sing Opera In Mandarin Chinese
Katherine Chu and Juliet Petrus, both alumnae of San Francisco Opera’s Merola/Adler young artists’ program, have written “the first book to introduce Mandarin as a language for singing, with a detailed explanation for the creation of sounds and a system for learning them. … Singing in Mandarin combines a brief study of linguistics, notes about the history of China and Taiwan, the development and significance of Pinyin …, a wealth of information about Mandarin pronunciation, and scores with multilingual text of Chinese [art] songs.” – San Francisco Classical Voice