How Local Dialects Work

Remember how you learned about swearing? It was probably from a kid around your age, maybe an older sibling, and not from an educator or authority figure. And you were probably in early adolescence: the stage when linguistic influence tends to shift from caregivers to peers. Linguistic innovation follows a similar pattern. – The Walrus

An Israeli TV Series Shows The Jewish State Locked In Civil War

“In [Autonomies], set in the near future, civil war has cut the land into two countries. The coastal State of Israel is nonreligious, with the cosmopolitan city of Tel Aviv as its capital. Jerusalem is a walled, autonomous city-state, run by [ultra-Orthodox] Haredi rabbis. At first glance dystopian, the show is in fact an artistic extrapolation of real-life rifts in Israeli society.” – The Guardian

Art Institute Of Chicago Plans Major Long-Term Makeover Of Its Campus

“For its first North American commission, the prize-winning firm Barozzi/Veiga … has begun formulating ideas aimed at making an inward-looking museum rooted in the 20th century more extroverted and modern via methods that could include adding new buildings, reconfiguring existing ones and rethinking the presentation of art within them.” – Chicago Tribune

Ex-L.A. Opera Staffer Gives Eyewitness Testimony Of Plácido Domingo Kissing And Groping Women

Former production coordinator Melinda McLain: “In rehearsal I saw him, at least once, grab one of the supernumeraries and just lay a kiss on her. … I also had young singers come and seek advice about how to repel his advances. And older singers, more principal singers, were concerned about their own marriages because of the inappropriate touching — some of which I saw myself, but also was reported to me by these singers so that we could figure out how to keep them out of his way.” (audio) – KCRW (Los Angeles)

Robert Frank, Influential Photographer Of Postwar America, Dead At 94

“[His] book, The Americans, published in this country in 1959, inspired generations of photographers, writers, filmmakers and musicians and made Mr. Frank one of the most important visual artists of the 20th century. … His images of lonely people, lonesome roads and smoldering tensions of urban life were a riposte to the honey-hued picture essays of popular magazines of the time such as the Saturday Evening Post and Life.” – The Washington Post

Do Arts Organization Boards Need To Be Battlegrounds?

Darren Walker: “Unfortunately, some people have framed having a diverse board as oppositional to having a wealthy board. These are one-dimensional ideas. I’m simply saying that you can have both, and you should have both. It would be a grave error to demonize wealthy people. That is something that I find regrettable about the discourse around the Whitney board, around this whole controversy.” – artnet

Why Birds Have Been Such Powerful Symbols Throughout History

“Birds enter popular culture from the earliest times, and they continue to pervade literature and art throughout the classical period. They are mentioned in the very first sentence of European literature – as scavengers, at the start of Homer’s Iliad. They feature repeatedly in subsequent epic, lyric, didactic, pastoral and personal poetry, in tragedy and comedy, in epigrams and invective, and in prose writings on geography, history, travel, medicine and early science.” – Aeon