Good Morning,
Theatre director Jay Miller started the Yard, a Hackney Wick fringe theatre (and London’s coolest venue), by posing as a property developer and wearing a charity-shop tie and offering a landlord free night-watchman service in place of paid security. The three-month pop-up ran 14 years, sent Michaela Coel’s Chewing Gum Dreams to the National Theatre, and has just reopened after a £7 million rebuild (The Nerve).
Sixty foreign architecture firms, not one of them Albanian, have proposed more than 500 projects for Prime Minister Edi Rama, coordinated partly through a WhatsApp group; an 800-page book of the plans has drawn “Starchitects go home!” placards in Tirana (The Guardian). Thélyson Orélien, the Québec novelist the Goncourt jury dropped over AI allegations he denies, sold 18,256 copies in a week to reach No. 1 in France, though that week also followed his Prix Fnac win (Rolling Stone Canada).
Seattle Public Library’s Books Unbanned program which makes available books banned in other jurisdictions, has passed 1.1 million e-book checkouts by readers 13 to 26 in all 50 states, paid for with nearly $900,000 in donations (KOMO News). Alexander Calder’s last work, Mountains and Clouds, again fills the nine-story atrium of the Hart Senate Office Building with its stabile and its mobile (The New York Times).
A Steinway showroom employee told AlterNet that the Kennedy Center’s grand pianos are moving to its Georgetown shop for sale because the center is “closed”; the same week, Senator Mike Lee objected to a bill that would bar demolishing presidential memorials (AlterNet).
