Spoleto Festival Director Makes The Arts’ Case Against The Travel Ban

Nigel Redden, in an op-ed in South Carolina’s largest newspaper: “Whether presenting an opera by Antonio Vivaldi or a play by Samuel Beckett, the Festival depends on works created by artists from many parts of the world. … [Their] varied outlooks come from lives and personal histories that differ from many in the audience who flock each year to the Festival. And this is why they flock: they come looking for the kind of personal connection that the performing arts provide especially well. … To limit these possibilities limits us as human beings.”

Walter Hautzig, Pianist Whose Talent Saved His Life In Nazi-Occupied Austria, Has Died At 95

After the German occupation of Austria, Hautzig knew he needed to get out. “Responding to an advertisement in a Jewish newspaper, he arrived at a Vienna hotel at 8 a.m. to audition for Emil Hauser, director of the Jerusalem Conservatory and a founder of the Budapest String Quartet. Mr. Hauser was not just offering fellowships; he was also offering exit visas.”

With A Win At The Directors Guild, La La Land Director Seems To Be On A Clear Oscar Path

And it was a political night at the DGA. DGA president Paris Barclay opened that with a clearly aimed statement: “If any person or any group of people, in the name of greater greatness, chooses to block, or to prevent, or to scapegoat, or to separate, or to divide the very people who are all about bringing people together, then we are going to stand with those people.”

Did This University Campus Cheat Itself Out Of A Massive New Shakespeare Center?

The story of the New Oxford Shakespeare, the one that’s shaking the Bard world with data-driven literary analysis and more, intertwines painfully (and in a way Shakespeare might have appreciated) with a tale of academic backstabbing, disappeared budgets and institutional support gone missing – if it was ever promised in the first place.

The Met: A Great Museum In Decline?

Yikes. “Tension inside the Met, the country’s largest art museum, is running so high that when curators and conservators recently wrote a letter protesting compensation cuts, the museum’s leaders chose not to show it to trustees for fear of leaks and bad publicity. Those who wanted to see the document had to go to the office of the Met’s general counsel and read it under observation.”

Living On The 81st Floor Is A Little Bit Noisy (Plus, The Building Sways)

With new technology, humans are building taller and taller residential – and luxury – skyscrapers. But “the payoff for peace and endless views can be five-minute waits for the lift at rush hour – and even sunburn. ‘You could get tanned in winter if you sat right by the window: there’s a bit of a greenhouse effect,’ the owner of a 64th-floor apartment above Chicago tells me. Vertigo can be another danger.”