“The newly unveiled coffin is one of 59 sealed sarcophagi unearthed at the Saqqara necropolis — a sprawling ancient cemetery located south of Cairo — in recent months. Found stacked on top of each other in three burial shafts of differing depths (between 32 and 39 feet each), the coffins date to Egypt’s 26th Dynasty, which spanned 664 to 525 B.C.” – Smithsonian Magazine
Author: Matthew Westphal
New York Philharmonic Cancels All Of 2020-21 Season
“It is really fair to say that in the 178-year history of the Philharmonic, this is the single biggest crisis,” said CEO Deborah Borda of the shutdown caused by the COVID pandemic. (A possible silver lining: could the hiatus be used to get started on reconstructing the orchestra’s concert hall?) – The New York Times
Herbert Kretzmer, Who Wrote Lyrics For ‘Les Miz’, Dead At 95
A career newspaperman, he started as a film journalist in his native South Africa and went on to be a theatre and TV critic for two London tabloids; he moonlighted as a song lyricist, writing the words for “Goodness Gracious Me,” “Yesterday When I Was Young,” and Charles Aznavour’s “She.” Then came the offer to write the English adaptation of an old flop, a French musical version of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables — and, as he later said, “I was able to give up my day job at 61.” – Variety
How The UK’s Famous Drama Schools Are Responding To Calls For Systemic Change In Theatre
“For many, British drama schools are beacons of excellence, whose training has led to fulfilling careers, but for others they have become symbols of all that is wrong with British theatre. The heads of some of the UK’s most prestigious schools speak to Lyn Gardner about finding the balance between tradition and change.” – The Stage
The Best Of D.H. Lawrence Is In The Essays We’ve Forgotten About
“What doomed Lawrence, in the long run, was not an accusation of phallocentrism but his elevation to the canon. … It is because Lawrence’s own purpose was so big that his novels make such nerve-racking reads. His writing is most at ease when … it happens glancingly. Only when he is caught off guard does he catch the essence of divine otherness.” – The New Yorker
The Man Who’s Saving India’s Rural Folk Music And The People Who Perform It
“Live and festival-centric performances, which is all these musicians have known through generations, barely bring in money, and an online presence has become mandatory for creative mileage. Many music traditions are dying out, with practitioners taking up menial labor to make ends meet.” Enter Abhinav Agrawal. – Ozy
Why We’re Finally Getting More Recordings Of Black And Female Composers: It’s Just Easier To Make Them Now
The key, writes David Patrick Stearns, is that there are “far more numerous entry points. … The era of self-produced recordings, ushered in by LSO Live!, allowed major symphonies by major artists to be delivered at a lower price, so buyers could take a chance on something they only might want to hear two or three times. The world has also become populated by boutique labels that will issue all manner of recordings, often handed to them ready-made by the artists with no overhead cost, and issued with a curatorial sensibility that’s considerably less narrow than major labels of the past.” – WQXR (New York City)
Why Can’t Amazon Figure Out How To Create Good Video Games?
“Any veteran of the video games industry will tell you that good games are products of miracle. … Yet Amazon’s total inability to excel in gaming is remarkable. Breakaway wasn’t its first fiasco, or its last. After more than a decade of concerted effort, the tech company that brute-forced its way to dominance in books, retail, and cloud computing has failed to produce a single successful big-name title.” Why? As one former employee put it, “There’s this hubris. We’re Amazon. We can do it all. We can spend our way to success.” – Wired
Ben Brantley: The Exit Interview
“During quarantine, when I couldn’t feed that [reviewing] addiction, I found myself chafing at the place-holding journalism that was required. Then in a Zoom meeting with critics, The Times‘s executive editor, Dean Baquet, lingered over the question of whether arts reviewers should stay in their jobs indefinitely. And I thought, ‘That sounds like an exit cue to me.’ After that, it was a surprisingly painless decision.” – The New York Times
Ben Brantley: The Farewell Essay
“‘Don’t you ever want to just sit back and enjoy it?’ That’s a question I’ve often been asked during my 27 years as a daily theater reviewer for The New York Times. And … the short answer to that question is an undiluted ‘no.’ One of the main reasons I never stopped loving this job is that I can’t sit back and go limp, like a passive slab on a massage table.” – The New York Times