Category: today’s top story

“Last weekend, 25 million viewers combined watched The Bible and The Walking Dead on basic cable channels. That’s more than triple the audience for The Good Wife on CBS that same night.”

“[He] reviewed movies for the Chicago Sun-Times for 46 years and on TV for 31 years, and [he] was without question the nation’s most prominent and influential film critic” – and the first movie writer ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for criticism.

“The Digital Public Library of America, to be launched on April 18, is a project to make the holdings of America’s research libraries, archives, and museums available to all Americans–and eventually to everyone in the world–online and free of charge.”

“For years, people who read Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s novels assumed she was born in India. … [But she was] a German Jew displaced by war to England, who married an Indian man and settled in his country. She absorbed enough of subcontinental culture to portray it with clarity and comic sensibility in books that earned her comparisons to Jane Austen.”

“‘Truly devastating”‘ for some authors but ‘like finding out my mom is marrying that cool dude next door that I’ve been palling around with’ for another, Amazon’s announcement late last week that it was buying the hugely popular reader review site Goodreads has sent shockwaves through the book industry.”

Musicians’ union committee chair David Gaudry: “We found over the course of the last weekend the mood of the two parties working together seemed to take a turn for the better. And it made for a more collaborative, problem-solving pair of sessions Friday and Saturday, and I think that’s really what allowed us to go forward and reach an agreement.”

“Assuming the deal is ratified this week by union members and the Symphony board, it paves the way for concerts to resume in Davies Symphony Hall as early as Tuesday morning.”

“The building now known as Broken Angel was an ordinary 19th-century brick structure until self-taught artist and sculptor Arthur Wood started building on top of it in the late 1970s. Now Wood faces eviction from his own masterpiece — a towering structure that looks like a cathedral built out of salvaged junk.”

Blake Gopnik: “In Tokyo, 758,266 people rush to see the treasures of Holland’s Mauritshuis museum; in New York, 605,586 people view the photos of Cindy Sherman, by Cindy Sherman … these are just a few of the staggering attendance figures for recent exhibitions. Could there be any better sign of the health of our museums? Unless we’re seeing symptoms of florid illness.”

“Both the musicians and the management of our major orchestras are overpaid. … Over the past 30 years they have demanded higher and higher paychecks while ticket sales and recording revenues have continued to drop dramatically. There is no business in the world that can sustain a negative revenue model like that.” (Emphasis in original.)