Art and Culture

Are big orchestras officially back? The recent starry Broadway revivals of Sweeney Todd, Camelot, and Parade have eschewed what has become the Broadway norm. Orchestras are growing again, harkening back to the golden age…
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Images courtesy of Brad Phillips. This morning, before breakfast, I played nineteen games of Scrabble on my phone. I won thirteen. It took less than an hour. Over the past twenty-five years, I’ve played Scrabble every day,…
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At the core of these deflections is an implication: The hypothetical superintelligence they are building is too big, too world-changing, too important for prosaic concerns such as copyright and attribution. – The Atlantic (MSN)…
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The reason for the return to larger-cast shows gets at the heart of what makes the 89-year-old company unique. OSF is one of the biggest nonprofit theaters in the U.S., but it’s based in Ashland, Ore., which has a population of just…
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Agnes Arnold-Forster was once a very nostalgic child. An avid reader of Enid Blyton novels, she tells us, she unsuccessfully begged her parents to “divert me from my 1990s London primary to a boarding school in 1950s Cornwall”. Although…
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“The entire book that you are going to read was written under the pressure of a sort of religious terror in the author’s soul, produced by the sight of this irresistible revolution.” These words were written by Alexis de…
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Since the moment I learned about the concept of the “thought-terminating cliche” I’ve been seeing them everywhere I look: in televised political debates, in flouncily stencilled motivational posters, in the hashtag wisdom that clogs my…
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Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, auditions were not held until 2021, and a concertmaster still had not been chosen after three rounds of auditions from 2021 to 2023. In the meantime, leadership of the string section fell to the…
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In 1959, at the stifling, snobbish Jesuit boarding school to which my loving parents had unwisely subcontracted my care, Tom Lehrer’s songs burst upon my consciousness like a clown in a cathedral. Days there began with mass, and ended…
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At least 1,000 paintings that the artist Damien Hirst said were “made in 2016” were created several years later, the Guardian can reveal.Hirst produced 10,000 of the paintings, each comprising colourful hand-painted dots on A4 paper, as…
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