Is Hollywood Really Making Progress Hiring Minorities And Women? Sandra Oh Says –

“I’m not going to say that the tide has changed, no. But … I think people who have been in power, who have mostly been white men, and people who are white, they listen now. They not only listen and are open, they make the effort for change. I do feel that has changed. I can feel it now because of the way I can push: ‘Hey, what about this? Hey, what about that?’ Trust me, I’m relentless.

‘New Yorker’ Writer Who’s Become Pro Poker Player Says Poker Is Far Harder Work

Maria Konnikova: “It’s really physically and emotionally and mentally exhausting. I’m just sitting at a poker table inside a casino. I don’t actually see any of the places I visit a lot of the time. It can get really lonely. … People want to get into it because they think it’s easy money are absolutely insane. It’s some of the most difficult money in the world.”

Truthbrary.Org: Sacha Baron Cohen Creates Parody Wingnut Website To Accompany His New Series

“Why Truthbrary? Well, as the website, which seems to have been set up last year explains, it’s a rejection of ‘THE MAINSTREME MEDIA + THE LIEbrary OF FALSE INFORMATION THEY TRY TO PUSH INTO THE PUBLICS MIND’S.'” The television project to which Truthbrary is a companion, Who Is America?, features Baron Cohen posing as an arch-conservative “citizen journalist” and includes interviews with, among others, Sarah Palin, Roy Moore, and Dick Cheney, all unsuspecting.

So What *Is* This Sacha Baron Cohen Show That Duped Sarah Palin, Dick Cheney And Roy Moore?

Not much has yet been publicly revealed about Who Is America?, which premieres next week in Britain and the US, except that Cohen posed as a right-wing “citizen journalist” named Billy Wayne Ruddick Jr, PhD, who convinced Palin and Moore to be interviewed on camera and even got Dick Cheney to autograph a “waterboard kit.” In fact, since Palin found out she’d been duped and called Baron Cohen “evil, exploitative and sick,” Baron Cohen has issued a response, in character as Ruddick, which has been reproduced here.

Head Of Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Arts Program Talks About How The Arts Demonstrably Improve Cities

Mike Scutari interviews Kate D. Levin, who was also New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs commissioner for the 12 years Michael Bloomberg was mayor, about the “virtuous cycle that public art tends to trigger” and how government and non-governmental leaders in cities are coming to understand “the creative sector’s ability to address pressing civic issues.”

An Avant-Garde ‘West Side Story’ (?!?) Is Coming To Broadway

A pair of Belgian stage artists who are leaders of Europe’s institutional avant-garde, director Ivo van Hove and choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, will stage the first major American revival of the musical to make a complete departure from the model of Jerome Robbins’s original staging. (De Keersmaeker and her company have been regular visitors at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; van Hove has directed two Arthur Miller revivals on Broadway and won a Tony for one of them.)

Man Finds $1 Million Stolen Painting In Dad’s Garage

“Sometime in 1978 a huge piece by Robert Motherwell, the modernist painter, went missing from a Manhattan warehouse, one of dozens that were lost and thought stolen when Motherwell hired a moving company to help him switch his works from one storage site to another. On Thursday, four decades after it had disappeared, the 1967 work, ‘Untitled,’ now valued at $1 million, was returned to the foundation dedicated to preserving Motherwell’s legacy. It was found in a garage in upstate New York by the son of a man who used to work for the movers.”

Is Lang Lang Back? Well, Mostly (A Report From His Post-Injury Comeback At Tanglewood)

“Even at age 36, Lang Lang projects a boyish charisma that employs your protective instincts — all the more so if you saw him grow up before your eyes, emerging from his cramped Spruce Street apartment, speaking broken English, and yet becoming something as close to a rock star as any classical pianist can be.” David Patrick Stearns (who did see all that) reports on Lang Lang’s performance of a Mozart concerto with the Boston Symphony last week and checks in with Lang Lang’s primary teacher at Curtis, Gary Graffman.