Peter Gelb’s Salary Rose 36% In His Second Year At Met

“Peter Gelb earned $1.5 million in his second year as general manager of New York’s Metropolitan Opera, according to the company’s tax return for the year ending in July 2008. That was up 36 percent from the previous year. … Those numbers reflect a time before the fabled opera company at Lincoln Center started singing sorrowful tunes of loss as the economy tanked last fall.”

Online Typefaces Won’t Always Be So Primitive

“The strange reality of the Web is that it’s harder to display a novel font than it is to embed a video. In this realm, at least, print media are still way ahead. … Compared with the typical issue of Cosmo, Slate and every other online magazine look like something out of the 1800s. Typeface designers and font fanciers have new reason for optimism though.”

Female Film Directors Having An Unusually Strong Summer

“Of all the films you saw last year, it’s statistically likely that fewer than 10 percent were directed by women. … It’s worth mentioning that no woman has ever won an Oscar for directing. A grand total of three have been nominated during the award’s eight decades of history. All that said, an unusually high number of films made by women are in distribution in theaters around the country right now — which is to say, there are seven.”

Cuba Goes Crazy For Royal Ballet

“Cuba has rarely hosted a performance by a foreign dance company in the years since Fidel Castro came to power in 1959. So when the Royal Ballet announced that it would be the first ballet company for three decades to perform in Havana tomorrow, on its first visit to Cuba in its 78-year history – every ticket was sold within hours.”