Meet The First Woman Head Carpenter Of New York’s Backstage Workers’ Union

Jennifer Diaz, 34, “has made history, becoming the first female head carpenter of Local 1 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. The local’s 3,351 members work in spaces from the Met to Carnegie Hall, at Radio City Music Hall and Madison Square Garden, and in every Broadway theater – including the Walter Kerr, which is where she was one morning in September, overseeing the load-in for the musical Falsettos.”

Reading ‘Don Quixote’ With Fugitives From Pinochet’s Coup

Ariel Dorfman: “Of the myriad times since adolescence that I have returned to the story of Don Quixote de la Mancha, there is one I choose to remember – that I cannot help but remember – as we commemorate the 400th anniversary of the death of Miguel de Cervantes. That reading, in October 1973, took place among a distraught group of captive men and women who, like me, had sought asylum in the Argentine Embassy in Santiago, Chile, after the coup that overthrew the democratic government of Salvador Allende.”

Everyone Has Dumped On Brutalist Architecture. So Now It’s Popular Again

“Despite two generations of abuse (and perhaps a little because of it), an enthusiasm for Brutalist buildings beyond the febrile, narrow precincts of architecture criticism has begun to take hold. Preservationists clamor for their survival, historians laud their ethical origins and an independent public has found beauty in their rawness.”

Klaus Kertess, Art Dealer Who Launched Major Careers, Dead At 76

“Barely a quarter-century old, Kertess opened Bykert [Gallery] in September of 1966, with the financial backing of his former Yale classmate Jeff Byers … Over the next nine years, Bykert would show a formidable roster of artists associated with Minimalism, Post-Minimalism, and Process Art, including Brice Marden, David Novros, Barry Le Va, Alan Saret, Chuck Close, Bill Bollinger, and Dorothea Rockburne, among many others.”

Richard III = Donald Trump? Brush Up Your Shakespeare

“[Richard’s] success in obtaining the crown depended on a fatal conjunction of diverse but equally self-destructive responses from those around him. The play locates these responses in particular characters … but it also manages to suggest that these characters sketch a whole country’s collective failure.” Stephen Greenblatt, general editor of The Norton Shakespeare, lays out the parallels – not so much between the monarch and the mogul as between Richard’s England and Trump’s America.

Researchers Discover That Music And Dance Change Our Brains In Markedly Different Ways

“The pathways that were most affected were bundles of fibers that link the sensory and motor regions of the brain and the fibers of the corpus callosum that run between the hemispheres. In the dancers, these sets of connections were broader (more diffuse); in musicians, these same connections were stronger, but less diffuse, and showed more coherent fiber bundles.”

Scottish Survey: All Time High In Engagement With Culture

Overall, the report says 95 percent consume culture. “The figures cover both attendance at cultural events, the most popular of which is watching a film in the cinema, and cultural participation, the most popular of which is reading for pleasure. When trips to the cinema are excluded, the proportion of the population who attended a cultural event in 2015 stands at 75%. This figure has risen from 70% in 2012. When reading for pleasure is excluded, 52% participated in a cultural activity in 2015, up from 48% in 2012.”