Category: today’s top story

“Penumbra Theatre, the nation’s largest and most esteemed African-American theater, is suspending its programming and will offer no plays this year. Citing what it called ‘an immediate cash-flow challenge,’ the St. Paul-based company said it has laid off six of its 16 full-time employees, including associate artistic director Dominic Taylor, to help trim $800,000 from its $2.7 million budget.”

“[For] the last decade, the Rijksmuseum has been operating in third gear – its treasures crammed into one wing while its main building has undergone a renovation process that has dragged on for far longer than was intended. … Amsterdam’s grandest cultural institution has finally revealed the date for its full reopening – although it will not be for another seven months.”

“With only a month until the first scheduled concert of the season, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra has stopped paying its musicians and the Woodruff Arts Center has locked them out of the symphony facilities.”

“When the first issue of its new Chinese-language edition appears next month, the London-based literary journal Granta … will have a presence in four of the five most widely spoken languages. But plans for the globalization of a leading quarterly that proudly calls itself ‘the magazine of new writing’ don’t stop there.”

“Big news in the Justice Department’s e-book price-fixing suit: Three of the five publishers accused of price-fixing – Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster – have agreed to pay $69 million to consumers to settle claims they illegally conspired to fix the price of e-books.”

“The United Nations cultural agency UNESCO has urged Libyan authorities to protect Sufi mosques and shrines under repeated attack by hardline Islamists who consider the traditional mystical school of Islam heretical.”

“According to committee chairman Rick Graef, a horn player with the ISO for the past two decades, management wants to reduce the number of musicians under contract from 87 to 63, cut wages by 45 percent, reduce the schedule from 52 to 36 weeks and revisit the terms of the musicians’ pension.”

The 78-year-old pianist is reportedly being treated at home rather than in a hospital.

“The High Line has become a tourist-clogged catwalk and a catalyst for some of the most rapid gentrification in the city’s history.”

“The acclaimed author of titles including Norwegian Wood, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and, most recently, IQ84, Murakami has been given odds of 10/1 to win the Nobel by Ladbrokes.” Last year’s odds-on favorite, Syrian poet Adonis (who did not win), is now in a three-way tie for third place at 14/1.