What this administration cannot capture directly of the country’s culture, it destroys with chaos, making life intolerable for people who persevere in the audacious belief that things like “the increase and diffusion of knowledge” actually matter. – Washington Post (Yahoo)

That language has been removed from the website, and the marker in the cemetery has been replaced by a new sign that omits wording critical of slavery and the Confederacy. – Washington Post

“He played a leading role in developing the independent dance scene through the 1970s and early ‘80s, before going on to direct Ballet Rambert for six years from 1986, and then the Richard Alston Dance Company from 1994 to 2020.” – The Guardian

Mayor Roberto Gualtieri presented the recently restored ‘Painted City’ fresco and ‘Great Mosaic’ that were discovered in an underground gallery during excavations in the 1990s of the Baths of Trajan on the Oppio hill near the Colosseum.” The sites are opening on a trial basis, only on weekends, strictly for small groups. – AP

In the English-speaking world, is there a decline in our literacy and in how people live with literature? For the past while there has been a debate on whether we are losing our literary culture – James Marriott thinks we are at the “dawn of the post-literate society” and has a forthcoming book that extends the argument. I’ll write up a review when I get my copy, but Henry Oliver has already obtained it, and gives some thoughtful pushback on Marriott’s analysis. Who’s right?

I’m not sure. My intuition leans towards Marriott, but it is not due to any of the statistical analysis he provides (nor am I comforted by the statistical analyses cited by people who think Marriott has it wrong). And this is because we are in the realm of the unquantifiable.

There is no data that will tell us whether people are reading, understanding, enjoying, discussing with their friends, good books. Because there is no such statistical category. I can look up that in 2025 there were over six hundred thousand books published through traditional means (rather than self-published) in the United States, which seems to me an astoundingly big number, but that doesn’t tell me anything about the number of new works of well-wrought fiction, or poetry, or non-fiction. I can tell you that as of the last survey on public “participation” in the arts, 46.6% of adults in Indiana read at least some novels, short stories, poetry or plays, but I can’t tell you how much of it was forgettable trash. Yes, it’s true that virtually everybody reads something, if only on their phones, but that’s not the same, is it? And even if I read good, thoughtful short pieces on the very platform where I first wrote this post, the Substackers worth reading are those who have a deep personal history, and continuing practice, of reading intelligent books.

We can’t quantify the state of film by looking at annual box office numbers, or counting the number of people who watched a movie last month, or looking at the number of films released. We can’t quantify the state of visual art by the number of new galleries, or auction prices at Christie’s, or what proportion of Michiganders went to a gallery last year. We can’t quantify the cultural life of a city (sorry, I mean “vibrancy”) by adding up how many people who call themselves artists live there, or how much money is spent on entertainment there.

Whether there is a decline in meaningful engagement with good books is subjective, and cannot be calculated. It doesn’t mean we cannot say anything – the function of criticism is to bring an experienced, closely observant, unbiased eye to new (and old) works of art and music and literature, even if that eye is necessarily subjective (I am Humean on this subject). And I think the important question to ask about the current state of literacy is whether there continues to be a wide enough selection of new books that are worthwhile (and I’ll confess I find the evidence from the New York Times Book Review rather depressing on that front), and whether there continues to be a healthy critical mass of people who read them. (We could do the same thing for any genre of art). Whether people are increasingly relying on audiobooks, whether new bookstores are opening, with entire shelves devoted to gay hockey player fiction, whether there’s been a recent uptick in sales of The Odyssey, are side issues.

I think the question is important – intelligent debate about things that matter (and I don’t just mean political issues) depends on a culture of books, even if not everyone takes part (and clearly not everyone does, or ever did). “Takes” that are found on blogs, or magazines, or op-ed pages of what’s left of newspapers, will only decline in quality as people start thinking they are a sufficient substitute for the depth that can only be found in books – all we will be left with is takes about takes (writes someone composing a take, yes I know!).

Cross-posted at https://michaelrushton.substack.com/

“Many performances will be staged at multiple venues, bringing the NSO to new places and making the shows more accessible to the broader D.C. region than ever before. With so many venues to choose from, we put together a guide.” – The Washington Post (Yahoo!)

“Inspired by the bravery and patriotism of Apple and Google, we are changing the name of South Park to SOUTH AMERICA,” creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker said in a statement. “We especially want to thank our parent company Paramount – a Skydance Capitulation.” – The Guardian

“The Eiffel Tower closed Monday due to strikes over outrage that female workers were allegedly ordered to leave and stay out of sight to comply with a special request from a traditional Hindu delegation that visited the monument over the weekend.” – ARTnews

“In her decision, … Judge Annalisa Torres said, that Netrebko and her team failed to prove that Peter Gelb ‘acted with actual malice when he made the allegedly defamatory statements.’ Additionally, the judge concluded that Netrebko’s team were unable to prove that ‘Gelb’s 2024 and 2025 remarks’ were made in retaliation for the lawsuit.” – OperaWire

This year’s laurates of the ¥15 million (approximately $95,000) prize, awarded by the Japan Art Association in the categories of painting, sculpture, architecture, theatre/film, and music are visual artists Holzer and Goldsworthy, architect Libeskind, actress Blanchett, and 99-year-old conductor Herbert Blomstedt, who was still working until earlier this year. – Artforum

The Philadelphia Fringe is now the largest in the country by venue count — 350-plus shows in 100-plus spaces (Philadelphia Magazine). The model runs on one premise: nobody has to prove anything to get in.

South Carolina is testing the opposite premise. Its arts commission funded all but two of the nearly 180 applicants its own panel approved, then asked the Greenville Gay Men’s Chorus and Proud Mary Theatre Company for extra evidence of “artistic merit” (The Post and Courier). A merit test applied to only two applicants is… concerning. Lonnie Bunch, who ran the Smithsonian through the campaign to purge “improper ideology” from its museums, is retiring (The Washington Post). And David Rubenstein, fired as Kennedy Center chair, bought the Joel Shapiro sculpture the Center carted off last week and is loaning it to the National Gallery (The New York Times). Removed art doesn’t have to vanish. It can relocate.

The day’s other gatekeeping fight is corporate. Court documents describe Anthropic’s “Project Panama,” an effort to “destructively scan all the books in the world” for training data (The New Yorker); now authors say publishers are claiming too big a slice of the settlement (TechCrunch). The books were pulped for a machine and the humans are fighting over the scraps.

The Met auditioned boa constrictors for Così fan tutte and cast a sun-glow boa named Princess (AP).

All of our stories below.

Miriam Alejandra Bianchi, known by the stage name Gilda, died 30 years ago in a highway collision, and she’s since become one of Argentina’s many folk saints, not officially recognized by the Vatican but venerated by ordinary people nevertheless. Gilda’s wrecked tour bus has even become a pilgrimage site. – AP

A healthy cultural ecosystem needs not just the creation and presentation of art. It needs education, access, discovery, interpretation and criticism, documentation, advocacy, funding, participation, connection, preservation and audience development. – Culture OC

“Why do you keep adding professionally trained dancers to the cast?” tweeted one fan in response to the news that the next crop of celebrity competitors — Jenna Dewan, Julia Stiles, and Harry Shum Jr. — have all at some point danced for their livelihood. – The Independent (UK)

The summer’s total was a nearly 30% improvement on the lackluster 2025 season. Notably, this summer’s tally was 9% higher than that of the same period in 2019 — before the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes upended the industry — though when accounting for inflation, this summer ends up ranking below. – Los Angeles Times

In a submission to Britain’s consultation on the proposals, the U.S. government said the plans would be state meddling in the algorithms of American companies that could amount to “extraterritorial censorship of protected speech by Americans online.” – Deadline

Just because something makes sense doesn’t mean that it’s true. Even valid reasoning cannot establish that its starting premises are correct. Even today, science continues to rely on experience, reasoning, and knowledge passed down by others. Much of the scientific process comes down to how we check our knowledge. – 3 Quarks Daily

“If the past few years of American literary publishing have had a zeitgeist, it has been more like a series of geists from zeits past.” – n+1

Like Balanchine, de Kooning made images for the mind about the body as it was expressed in the streets of the city. Sometimes, when I watch Balanchine’s choreography, I can’t help imagining “Monumental Woman” and other drawings from the “Women” series flashing behind the dancers as they embody de Kooning’s symphony of flesh. – The New Yorker

“Bunch’s resignation comes at one of the most politically fraught moments in the Smithsonian’s 180-year history. … Trump has sought to purge what he calls ‘improper ideology’ from its museums, while his administration has threatened the institution’s federal funding, tried to fire a museum director and challenged its authority over personnel and exhibitions.” – The Washington Post (Yahoo!)

Promises of prosperity by Reagan, Thatcher and other advocates of neoliberalism were mistaken because it brought only fragility to previously prosperous democracies. – Aeon

Guillem Alonso and his colleagues trained a new generation of tap dancers, and that generation, in turn, developed its own styles, pedagogies, and companies. They’re still developing them, as are their students. The result is a hotbed of creativity. – San Francisco Classical Voice

In August, the Commission confirmed grants to all but two of the nearly 180 applicants its selection panel had approved. Those two are the Greenville Gay Men’s Chorus and Spartanburg’s Proud Mary Theatre Company, which have been told to provide additional demonstration of their artistic merit beyond what was in their applications. – The Post and Courier (Charleston)