Buy A Painting By This Dog And Get Free Weed

In D.C., you see, it is legal to possess marijuana but not to sell it; there is, however, no law against giving it away. So the enterprising proprietors of District Derp gallery got the idea to sell paintings by Sudo — their four-year-old mini-husky, who’s been trained to paint with a specially constructed brush — and offer purchasers, as a bonus gift, an amount of cannabis equal in value to the price of the artwork. – Business Insider

Book Sales Were Down 35 Percent In April

Categories of books that sold best last month were fiction, cookbooks, and children’s books, but compared with April 2019, sales were largely down at the indies contacted. Most saw declines of more than 35% compared to the same period in the prior year. For many, online sales continue to be a lifeline, especially direct-to-home orders fulfilled by Ingram. – Publishers Weekly

The Medieval Book That Suggested How The World Looked

Asking a Medieval person to imagine the world and their place on it would demand a radically different sort of cognitive map than one a modern person might rely on. This affects pragmatic matters (of navigation and so forth), but also what could be termed poetic ones as well. Philosopher Bertrand Westphal writes in Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces that the “perception of space and the representation of space do not involve the same things,” and this is a crucial point. – Nautilus

Can Slapstick Comedy Work On Zoom? Bill Irwin’s About To Find Out

“‘Oh, I hope it holds together,’ he fretted the other morning, between rewrites and rehearsals of In-Zoom, his new 10-minute play. Performed by Irwin in New York and Christopher Fitzgerald, in North Carolina, it will have its livestream premiere Thursday evening on the website of [San Diego’s] Old Globe [theater].” The Tony- and MacArthur award-winning clown talks to Laura Collins-Hughes about how he’s putting it together. – The New York Times

Opening Of Berlin’s Humboldt Forum Postponed For The Umpteenth Time

As if the cost overruns, scheduling snafus and controversy over its holdings weren’t enough (not to mention last month’s tar fire), the opening of the city’s $700 million ethnographic museum has now been put off from September to an undetermined date because the coronavirus epidemic has stopped foreign construction workers from returning to finish the building. (The restaurant and gift shop might open sometime this year, though.) – Artnet

UK Festivals Say They Could Be Wiped Out

The Association of Independent Festivals (AIF), which represents 65 festivals in the UK, including Gloucestershire’s 2000trees, London’s Meltdown and Sheffield’s Tramlines, reports 92% of its members saying they face costs that could ruin their businesses as a result of cancelled events, with the vast majority (98.5%) not covered by insurance for cancellation related to Covid-19. – The Guardian