Teens Have Not Stopped Reading, And David Denby’s New Yorker Jeremiad Is ‘You Kids Get Off My Lawn’ Journalism

“Ah, it appears that, fleeing human connection, lost to their reductive gender-specific pastimes of sports and, um, friends, teen hyphen agers (The teen hyphen ager! In the pizza parlor! With the smart phone!) have murdered reading. But soft – no one is dead yet, not even you, geriatric Cassandra. Nor are the teen hyphen agers brain-dead.”

We’re Using A Totally Bogus Standard To Judge The Success Of Musicals

“Where once a musical running one or two years would have been a great success, that achievement has now been devalued. The 1989 production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Aspects of Love was the first time I heard the expression ‘West End failure’ applied to a show that had, in fact, run a very credible 1,325 performances but was being compared to Lloyd Webber’s previous musical, The Phantom of the Opera.”

Lara Downes: How To Make Music Matter

Downes says the “chemistry” between performers, between performers and audiences, and between all people and music explains why — during social upheaval and at times of great joy and heroism — classical music is a natural anecdote or a means of celebratory expression. “People pull out Beethoven when world events happen and they just need something beautiful.”

Where Do You Draw the Line Between Commercial and Literary Fiction?

James Parker: “I draw it up the side of the Boston Public Library. I draw it through the middle of Stephen King’s wallet. I draw it right between the frontal lobes of every writer who ever lived.”
Rivka Galchen: “Maybe Commercial Fiction is really great, or maybe it’s great the way a Dorito is great, but Commercial Fiction is in some way consonant with the market. … If, though, we didn’t have the term Literary to protect books of value that ¬aren’t brilliant as commerce, then we would have Melville’s Omoo and Typee but not Moby-Dick.