Category: today’s top story

“Chinese legal authorities released the dissident artist Ai Weiwei on Wednesday after a three-month detention, apparently ending a prosecution that had become a focal point of criticism of China’s eroding human rights record.”

“Donations to the arts began to rebound in 2010, with an estimated 5.7% increase after a combined drop of 8.2% in the deep recession years of 2008 and 2009… Factoring in inflation, the gain in arts giving was 4.1%.”

“It’s no longer only a place where people take out books and scholars dig through archives. The library has become a social network with physical and digital nodes … [and] three million active users … An institution as old and august as the NYPL is not supposed to react nimbly to new developments, let alone lead the media companies producing the books and magazines it preserves.”

“The oil on canvas depiction of Saint Augustine, an expressive, mature work dated to around 1600 … has been discovered in a private collection in Britain.”

“After a 2010-11 Broadway season acclaimed for strong performances, five casting directors sat down … to talk about their work and some of the hits (and misses) of the year.”

“The Kafka that many of us read for the first time was in part a construction of Edwin and Willa Muir. Readers on the whole worry little about it, being grateful for access to foreign goods. Nevertheless, I often wonder what people mean when they say they like the way that, for example, Haruki Murakami writes. Or Pasternak.”

“After keen debate at the Guardian‘s books desk, this is our list of the very best factual writing, organised by category, and then by date.” (You’ve probably heard of most of the titles.)

“In their fullest comments yet about the creative clashes this winter inside Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, Bono and the Edge, of U2 – first-time Broadway composers – said they originally embraced Julie Taymor’s script and characters for the show but were wholly ill-prepared for putting her ambitious ideas onstage.”

“It should be remembered that, more than any other music director before or since, Ormandy clearly understood his job description to encompass the entertainment end of the spectrum.”

“What are often termed ‘irreconcilable artistic differences’ have surfaced between me and Voice arts editor Brian Parks and forced me to make the difficult decision to stop submitting reviews to the paper and its Web site. … What I write doesn’t seem like arts criticism as he defines it. To put it more baldly: I do not write enough strongly negative reviews.”