‘Dracula’ Wasn’t Inspired By Transylvania — It Was Inspired By Ireland

The town of Sligo, specifically, and the dire cholera outbreak there in 1832. Dracula author Bram Stoker’s mother lived through that epidemic, and there’s evidence, circumstantial but convincing, that it was her memories of the pestilence on which Stoker built the original vampire novel; Transylvania, which the author never visited, was simply a stand-in location. – Atlas Obscura

Post-Plague Poetry In Medieval England Could Be Downright Reactionary

With the huge drop in population following the Black Death, peasants and laborers were able to take advantage of the labor shortage to demand higher pay and improve their lives. Those who had been at the top of 14th-century society weren’t happy about that — and since they were the ones who were literate, such works as Langland’s Piers Plowman, Gower’s Vox Clamantis, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales reflected and reinforced their readers’ wish that the social order stay the way it was. – The Conversation

Venetians Are Loving This Not-Utterly-Overrun-By-Tourists Thing. Is There Any Hope Of Preserving It?

Residents and interested observers have been concerned for years about the local economy’s addiction to mass tourism and the ills that accompany it. Italy’s COVID lockdown has, at least temporarily, returned Venice to its own people, and many of them are wondering how they might be able to keep it. – The New York Times

Here’s One Area Of Publishing That’s Making Progress On Diversity: Audiobooks

“Audiobook publishers are increasingly offering opportunities to narrators of color, … a response to a broader range of stories and desire for the voice talent to reflect that diversity. … But the particular demands of the job, compared with film and stage acting, make this tricky. What does representation mean when actors can only be heard and not seen? What constitutes a black, Latino or Asian voice? And to complicate matters, in most audiobooks a single narrator voices multiple characters, who may have a variety of ethnicities and accents.” – The New York Times

Black Theatre Workers Call Out Broadway Racism

Several black actors, writers, and others working in the New York theater have come forward to share the stories of the racism embedded in the industry. Many of them described hearing subtly or overtly racist language from powerful white people within the industry and described their frustration with producers and theater owners currently issuing boilerplate statements (like many brands) about the Black Lives Matter movement. – New York Magazine

Why Our Sense Of Time Is Messed Up Under Lockdown

Our internal clocks and external cues have fallen out of sync, explains Anthony M. Tobia, associate professor of the Division of Consultation Psychiatry at the Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. The external cues we’d process without really thinking about it pre-pandemic “just don’t exist anymore, so we’re not automatically doing the things we usually do,” he says. “Therefore, there’s a loss of time perception.” – Mic