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Pier 24 Photography opens last show before closing
NEW YORK, NY.- As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. In its more than ten years, Pier 24 Photography has exhibited many thousands of photographs, and thus hundreds of thousands of hypothetical words. Up until now, every show has begun with the Pilara Foundation Collection and expanded from there. Turning the Page is the first exhibition that does not feature works from the collection. Instead, it looks at and celebrates the photobook, a medium that has undergone its own renaissance parallel to Pier 24 Photography's years in operation. Each of the galleries presents works from a distinct photobook, whether an iconic volume or a recent monograph. The content, sequence, and design of each selected book guided the approach to that particular installation, aiming for a thoughtful translation of its overall ... More

Inside the crisis at NPR
NEW YORK, NY.- NPR employees tuned in for a pivotal meeting late last year for a long-awaited update on the future of the public radio network. After many tumultuous months, marked by layoffs, financial turbulence and internal strife, they signed in to Zoom hoping to hear some good news from NPR’s leaders. What they got instead was a stark preview of the continued challenges ahead. “We are slipping in our ability to impact America, not just in broadcast, but also in the growing world of on-demand audio,” Daphne Kwon, NPR’s chief financial officer, told the group, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by The New York Times. For the past two weeks, turmoil has engulfed NPR after a senior editor assailed what he described as an extreme liberal bias inside the organization that has bled into its news coverage. The editor, ... More

What to know about Venice's fees for day trips
ROME.- After years of debate, Venice, Italy, on Thursday will begin charging day visitors 5 euros (about $5.35) to visit its fragile historic center on peak days, making it the first city in the world to adopt such a measure to counter overtourism. Critics question whether a nominal fee will put people off from visiting one of the world’s most desired destinations. But officials hope that it might encourage some to rethink their plans and decide to come on weekdays or in the offseason. That might help mitigate the impact of the estimated 20 million visitors who descended last year on the city’s beleaguered residents, which number fewer than 50,000, according to municipal statistics. About half of those visitors came only for the day, city officials said. Overnight guests are exempt from the fee. The spirit of the initiative, city officials have said, is ... More

In coral fossils, searching for the first glow of bioluminescence
NEW YORK, NY.- Bioluminescence is used throughout the animal kingdom, particularly in marine environments, to lure prey, startle predators and even act as camouflage in the surrounding light. “We always say it’s light-limited in the deep sea, but there are a lot of organisms that produce their own light,” said Andrea Quattrini, a zoologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington. The dazzling glow of bioluminescence is common in Octocorallia, also known as octocorals, a class of more than 3,000 Anthozoa species including sea fans, sea pens and soft corals. The prevalence of bioluminescence in these sessile animals makes a lot of sense, Quattrini said: “They settle somewhere and they’re there.” How long organisms have been able to emit light is at the center of recent research by Quattrini and colleagues. ... More

'Oh, Mary!,' a surprise downtown hit, will play Broadway this summer
NEW YORK, NY.- “Oh, Mary!,” an outrageously madcap comedy that imagines the former first lady Mary Todd Lincoln as an oft-inebriated chanteuse-wannabe, will transfer to Broadway this summer after becoming a surprise hit downtown. The show, which is gleefully tasteless and also ahistorical, is the brainchild of Cole Escola, an alt-cabaret performer who built a cult following with a series of YouTube sketches and reached a wider audience with a role on Hulu’s “Difficult People.” The Broadway run is scheduled to begin previews June 26 and to open July 11 at the Lyceum Theater. It is scheduled to run until Sept. 15. “Oh, Mary!” began its life in January at the Lucille Lortel Theater in the West Village. That commercial off-Broadway run has been extended twice and is scheduled to end May 12. The run has been sold out, and has attracted ... More

Steve Carell as the 50-year-old loser in a comic 'Uncle Vanya'
NEW YORK, NY.- Why is it called “Uncle Vanya”? All the man does is mope, mope harder, try to do something other than moping, fail miserably and mope some more. You can’t blame him. Vanya has spent most of his nearly 50 years scraping thin profit from a provincial estate, and not even for himself. The money he makes, running the farm with his unmarried niece, goes to support life in the city for his fatuous, gouty sort-of-ex-brother-in-law, an art professor who “knows nothing about art.” Also, Vanya is hopelessly in love with the old man’s exquisitely languorous young wife, who, reasonably enough, finds the moper pathetic. In short, he is the opposite of the bold, laudable characters most writers of the late 1890s would name a play for. That’s probably just why Anton Chekhov did it, announcing a new kind of protagonist for a new ... More

Lily Gladstone and Riley Keough investigate a chilling murder
NEW YORK, NY.- “We’ve been teenage girls,” Lily Gladstone said. Which means that Gladstone and her co-star, Riley Keough, know what teenage girls can do. In “Under the Bridge,” a limited series now streaming on Hulu, Keough and Gladstone play a writer and a cop investigating the 1997 beating and murder of Reena Virk, a 14-year-old Indo-Canadian girl. Six teenage girls and one teenage boy, many of them Virk’s classmates, were eventually convicted. The case has inspired plays, poems, documentaries and several books, including Rebecca Godfrey’s 2005 literary nonfiction work “Under the Bridge,” which gives the series its shape and name. (The show also relies on a memoir by Virk’s father, Manjit Virk.) Though Godfrey died in 2022, before filming began, she worked closely with the show’s creator, Quinn Shephard, on ... More

Helen Vendler, 'Colossus' of poetry criticism, dies at 90
NEW YORK, NY.- Helen Vendler, one of the leading poetry critics in the United States, with a reputation-making power that derived from her fine-grained, impassioned readings, expressed in crystalline prose in The New Yorker and other publications, died on Tuesday at her home in Laguna Niguel, California. She was 90. The cause was cancer, said her son, David Vendler. In an era dominated by poststructuralist and politically influenced literary criticism, Vendler, who taught at Harvard for more than 30 years, adhered to the old-fashioned method of close reading, going methodically line by line, word by word, to expose a poem’s inner workings and emotional roots. “Vendler has done perhaps more than any other living critic to shape — I might almost say ‘create’ — our understanding of poetry in English,” poet and critic Joel ... More

For Maxine Hong Kingston, age is just time going by
NEW YORK, NY.- In a way, I don’t believe in old age. I hear people say, “this hurts” or “that hurts,” and they attribute that pain to old age. It’s not age. Age is just time going by, and that’s very mysterious. I don’t think about vanity much. I look in the mirror and if I think, “I look young, that’s good enough.” Instead of wearing lipstick or rouge, I darken my eyebrows. I can express all kinds of things just with my eyebrows. I do think about retiring, but stories and ideas keep coming. As Phyllis Hoge, a poet and my best friend, used to say, “We won’t die until we’ve finished our work.” I was born this way. From a very young age I just wanted to be a storyteller or a poet. I didn’t know what I was going to write. I wasn’t even aware at that age that I had nothing to write about. Sometimes I’ve thought, or had the illusion, th ... More

How 'Stereophonic' made musicians out of actors
NEW YORK, NY.- About a week into rehearsals for the off-Broadway premiere of David Adjmi’s latest play, “Stereophonic,” Will Butler sent an email to the cast. Butler, a former member of Arcade Fire, had a new band, Will Butler + Sister Squares, and a new self-titled album. A club in Brooklyn would soon host the record release party. Butler, the composer of “Stereophonic,” had a proposition: The actors should open for him. Sarah Pidgeon, a cast member, remembered reading the message last August during a rehearsal break. “I immediately said no,” she recalled. “Because what if it’s a failure?” She had taken piano lessons as a child, but Pidgeon didn’t consider herself a musician. Neither did any of the other actors. “Stereophonic,” which opened last week at Broadway’s Golden Theater, is set in recording studios in ... More