THEATER
The EGOT Winner Behind Sondheim’s Signature Sound (The New York Times)
No Broadway Shows? No Problem. Walking Tours Fill a Void. (The New York Times)
Building David Byrne’s ‘Utopia,’ One Gray Suit At A Time (The New York Times)
With a Mess of Fabrics, Broadway’s Costume Shops Return to Work (The New York Times)
How ‘Some Like It Hot’ Tunes In to the Jazz Age (The New York Times)
Performing Off Broadway, While Driving Off Broadway (The New Yorker)
Music for Robots: Being a Firefly on the Wall In the Studio with the Maybe Happy Ending Band (Broadway.com)
Tony-Nominated Lighting Designer Isabella Byrd Is Not Afraid of the Dark (Broadway.com)
ART
Performance artist Marina Abramović’s unusual methods (The Saturday Paper)
The Other Side of Cindy Sherman (The Australian)
TELEVISION & FILM
What the Hell Was Bartmania? (Vulture)
Andrew Niccol Lives In His Own Truman Show (And So Do You) (WIRED)
Why Lisa Simpson Matters (Vanity Fair)
The Science (And Scientists) Behind ‘Ant-Man’ (The New York Times)
Mike Flanagan Explores His Private Horrors in ‘Midnight Mass’ (The New York Times)
In ‘Toy Story 4,’ the Animators Pulling the Strings Reveal Woody’s Inner Life (The New York Times)
Rocko’s Modern Life: Inside the Barely Contained Chaos of a Nickelodeon Classic (Vanity Fair)
The Young Man and the Sea Sponge (Longreads)
“Just a Concoction of Nonsense”: The Oral History of ‘A Fish Called Wanda’ (Vanity Fair)
MUSIC
The Never-Ending Life of Smash Mouth’s “All Star” (The Ringer)
John Williams on ‘Indiana Jones’ and His Favorite Scores (The New York Times)
Ben Folds’s latest project pays homage to Gershwin, ‘the Elton John of his day’ (The Guardian)
Why ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ the Album Has Always Rocked (The New York Times)
How Hans Zimmer Conjured the Other-Worldly Sounds of ‘Dune’ (The New York Times)
LITERATURE & LINGUISTICS
R.L. Stine on the Importance of Scaring the Hell Out of Children (Medium)
Word wranglers (The Monthly)
Rose’s Turn of Phrase: A Linguistic Exploration of ‘Coming Up Roses,’ from Gypsy (Broadway.com)
THE INTERNET & POP CULTURE
Ermahgerddon: The Untold Story of the Ehrmagerd Girl (Vanity Fair)
The Story of the DuckTales Theme (Vanity Fair)
Charlie Brown Never Found His Little Red Haired Girl, But We Did (Vanity Fair)
Night of a Thousand Paul Giamattis (Vulture)
Poppy is Dead; Long Live Poppy (Vanity Fair)
ARCHITECTURE AND THE ENVIRONMENT
Keeping Broadway’s Golden Age Alive with Restoration Architect Francesca Russo (Broadway.com)
Central Park During the Pandemic (Hazlitt)
As the Tonys Head Uptown, Step Inside the United Palace ‘Dream World’ (The New York Times)
This is Not an Opera House (The Monthly)
TRAVEL
Holidaying in War Zones: Intrepid or Irresponsible? (Good Weekend)
GAMING
The Man Behind the Legendary Donkey Kong Country Soundtracks (The New York Times)
The Role-Playing Game That Predicted The Future (The Atlantic)
‘The Last of Us Part II’ and its Crisis-Strewn Path to Release (WIRED)
Game Over, Uwe Boll (Vanity Fair)
The Unbearable Lightness of ‘Animal Crossing’ (WIRED)
How ‘Immortality’ Developer Sam Barlow Designs Stories to Haunt Players (The Washington Post)
(The Legacy of Zelda: How Nintendo Told Gamers to Get Lost) The Economist
Felikz Zemdegs, Rubik’s Champion (The Monthly)
TECHNOLOGY
Spotify Builds a Music Experience for Children (The Wall Street Journal)
Hearing Loss? A New Device Lets You Feel Sound (The Wall Street Journal)
How ‘Avatar: The Way of Water’ Solved the Problem of Computer-Generated H2O (The New York Times)
The Game-Changing Tech Behind Gemini Man’s ‘Young’ Will Smith (WIRED)
MISCELLANEOUS MISCHIEF