Indigenous Australian Artists: It’s Time We Stop Being Reviewed By White Culture

“It feels like a moment where we are angry and ready enough to address how white Australian review culture maligns Indigenous work by only superficially engaging with it. It feels like a moment where we are ready to sustain our own review culture. We have centuries of white engagement with Indigenous story as evidence for the need to change; we also have our own critics, who show us what’s possible when whiteness loses its frame of evaluative authority over a work.” – The Guardian

Off-Broadway’s Best-Connected, Best-Loved Talent-Spotter

“For the past 15 years, [Jason Eagan] has been the remarkably well-connected, stealthily low-profile, principal creative force shaping the innovative Off-Broadway incubator Ars Nova. … He’s the guy who plucked an obscure Billy Eichner out of one Manhattan basement and an unknown Lin-Manuel Miranda out of another; who discovered the alt-cabaret comedian Bridget Everett at midnight at a karaoke bar; who looked upon the glorious excess of Dave Malloy’s nascent War and Peace musical, Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, and said, in effect: ‘More.’ ‘Keep going.’ And ‘Yes.'” – The New York Times

Is London’s Proposed New Concert Hall Merely A Play For Bragging Rights?

The scheme is slated to cost nearly £300 million and is London’s volley in an intercontinental game of high culture one-upmanship, which in recent years has produced Herzog & de Meuron’s Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg and Jean Nouvel’s Philharmonie in Paris. This arms race for cultural dominion has, in London however, reached new levels of absurdity with the decision to build the new 2,000 seat concert hall less than 300 metres from an existing 2,000 seat concert hall. – dezeen

Working To Diversify The Buncha-White-Guys World Of Improv

“Improv may still skew white, but things are changing. … The following folks are currently working to alter perceptions and expectations about improv. Some are longtime warriors, others are new to the scene. But all point toward a future in which the stage presents a more diverse mix of ages, nationalities, body types, skin tones, gender identities, sexual orientations, and, yes, even political affiliations.” – American Theatre

The International Campaign To Rebuild And Restock The Mosul University Library

With well over half a million books in Arabic and more than one million antique maps, documents, and other materials (including a 9th-century Quran), the library was one of the most important in the Middle East — until ISIS began its destruction while it occupied the city (2014-17). Now the NGO Book Aid International and a project called the Mosul Book Bridge are gradually undoing the damage. – Publishing Perspectives

An Attempt At An NPR For Conservatives?

The nightly two-hour show, which is carried on nearly 200 radio stations nationwide and boasts an estimated audience of 1.3 million, might not identify as ideological or political, at least not overtly. But Lee Habeeb has clearly positioned it as a right-of-center alternative to NPR, whose programs such as Morning Edition and All Things Considered also emphasize skillful story-telling, but which many conservatives perceive, rightly or not, as inhospitable to anything that isn’t progressive or politically correct. – The Daily Beast