“[Larry] Kramer’s portrait of what a generation of gay men suffered renders America akin to a warzone, where the corpses of victims are refused death certificates and left to collect dust in oversized refuse bags, and funerals become so frequent as to be social events. … The Normal Heart is a primal howl from the frontline, with all of its mud and viscera, expressive of the fact that when your friends are dying all around you, you have no choice but to act urgently.” – BBC
Author: Matthew Westphal
Is There Such A Thing As Contemporary Conservative Literature? Can There Be?
No, Atlas Shrugged doesn’t count as literature, and neither do Ann Coulter and Dinesh D’Souza. “To define Right-wing literature is to ask what literature is and what it’s for, but the most ready-to-hand answers (beauty, truth, empathy, expression) are incongruous to conservatism’s means, if not to the perverse utopianism of its final objectives.” – Aeon
Meet The New York Dance World’s Bubble Doctor
“Bubbling has gained traction in the dance world as companies and organizations try to find ways of bringing artists together to create work in a safe environment. That involves rules, medical protocols, tests and vigilance, and it requires a presiding authority to decide what those should be. Enter Dr. Wendy Ziecheck, a Manhattan internist, who trained with George Balanchine’s doctor and was the medical director for the Rockettes before taking this unlikely new career path.” – The New York Times
Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center, Battered By Pandemic, May Have To Rework Its Entire Business Model
“Until its COVID-forced closure in March, the Kimmel was earning 93% of its income,” mainly from touring Broadway shows and rent from its resident groups, “leaving just the small remainder to be made up in donations — an unusually lopsided ratio among nonprofits. Now, though, with ticket sales gone, the Kimmel cannot lean on a list of loyal donors to the extent that some other groups can.” – The Philadelphia Inquirer
Arts And STEM Require Same Type Of Creativity: Study
“According to study authors, the creativity toolkits used in the arts and in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) are actually very similar. Fundamentally, both rely on being open to new ideas, employing divergent thinking, and maintaining a sense of flexibility, they say.” – Fast Company
Meet One Of America’s Most Promising Young Black Conductors
Roderick Cox, 33, had been associate conductor of the Minnesota Orchestra for two years when, in 2018, he won the Georg Solti Conducting Award. He then relocated to Europe, and his career has been on the rise ever since. – The Dallas Morning News
2,000-Year-Old, 120-Foot-Long Etching Of Cat Found In Peruvian Desert
“The newly identified likeness is a Nazca Line — one of hundreds of ancient drawings created in the Peruvian desert by removing rock and soil to produce a ‘negative’ image in the sand. … Dated to between 200 and 100 B.C., the geoglyph is thought to be older than any others previously discovered in the region.” – Smithsonian Magazine
For Its First Post-Lockdown Show, Prado Walks Straight Into Controversy Over Art World’s Sexism
“The exhibition, whose English title is ‘Uninvited Guests’, explores how artworks bought and celebrated by the Spanish state between 1833 and 1931 treated women as people and artists. … [The show has] faced criticism from some female artists and academics, who have accused the museum of echoing the very misogyny it has sought to expose by focusing on many works by men rather than celebrating those by women.” – The Guardian
China Is Now Officially The World’s Most Lucrative Movie Market
“Movie ticket sales in China for 2020 climbed to $1.988 billion on Sunday, surpassing North America’s total of $1.937 billion. … Analysts have long predicted that the world’s most populous country would one day top the global charts. But the results still represent a historic sea change: North America has been the global box office’s center of gravity since the dawn of the motion picture business.” – The Hollywood Reporter
The AOL Decision That Ruined The Internet, Way Back In 1993
“For nearly 30 years, the internet’s culture has been defined by a corporation’s move that seemed to, without any care about what was left behind, ensure that a sense of order would never again drive the growth of this series of tubes. This phenomenon is, in many ways, the central tension on which the modern internet is built. And it’s a tension that most people aren’t aware of, even though it is an undercurrent secretly framing our online interactions.” – Tedium