Category: issues

Boston University and WBUR received reports of allegations against “On Point” host Tom Ashbrook late in the week. The station general manager said, “Tom will be on leave from his duties at WBUR while an outside organization hired by Boston University examines these allegations. We will decide a course of action after getting the results of this investigation.”

“I think making an airport as local as possible is a great strategy toward improving the experience. Some people live in this paradigm that an airport should be a global space, super-cosmopolitan, but we’ve seen a reversal of that trend. What you want is a unique experience, not a generic one.” That means good barbecue and jazz at Austin-Bergstrom, country singers at Nashville. BWI sells Baltimore-style crab, and Vancouver has one of the world’s great collections of Northwestern native art. Munich’s airport has a beer garden.

Los Angeles tops the list on our combined measure of employed and self-employed artists. Los Angeles not only has a larger concentration of artists than New York City based on its LQ, it has a larger number of absolute artists, even though New York City has a much larger general population. Indeed, it’s been shown that a significant number of artists are moving from the New York City to the Los Angeles metro.

“When people are presented with a perfect image of something — whether a product or a perfect person — it doesn’t feel authentic. And the Museum of Failure, with its artifacts, feels — and is — completely genuine and authentic. And that’s something that’s not so common today.”

“The locals, accused of pilfering ancient artifacts from the surrounding desert, were charged with violating the federal Archaeological Resources Protection Act and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Authorities recovered more than 40,000 artifacts, some dating to 6,000 B.C., Smithsonian Magazine reported. The federal sting — dubbed Operation Cerberus by authorities —  would prove to be the match igniting long-simmering tensions across the region.”

“The museum, which opened in November, fits with a wider cultural movement in the Gulf. Over the past decade, the region has begun a sort of cultural arms race, one that counters its image as a wealthy desert with little culture or history. I.M. Pei’s Museum of Islamic Art opened in 2008 in Doha, and when it is completed in a year or so, Jean Nouvel’s desert-rose design for the National Museum of Qatar may even surpass his vision for the Louvre.”

The suit, announced in a statement, is the first in the United States to seek recognition of the constitutional right to literacy, the lawyers said. It alleges that the state failed to intervene when students achieved low proficiency rates in reading and fell behind at the three schools, which are among the lowest performing in the state.

“An amendment [added by Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kansas) would strike artists’ housing from the list of qualified groups who can benefit from federally subsidized low-income housing. … Moreover, as written, the law would also render all existing artists’ housing developments built with housing credits retroactively ineligible for the benefit – creating a sudden tax liability for the investors who have used these credits for years.”

Is this caste system the future of theatre criticism? On one side a wading pool of compensated pros, on the other a swarming mass of unedited amateurs with domain names and hot takes? There must be alternatives. Luckily, new models have emerged to pick up the slack left by local media and elevate arts writing above snarky, thumbs-up-or-down consumer reporting.

“At the end of September, county commissioners voted to remove $550,000 from the $4m grant promised to the Pérez Art Museum Miami (Pamm) for the current financial year. The money was allocated instead to the American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora, a small institution in Coral Gables, which opened in January.”