Seems like no one's reading these days

Plus, Cate Blanchett returns to the orchestra.

Last week I finished John Gregory Dunne’s Vegas. We can chat about it if you want.

I also watched Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl (2024)—big Vegas week—and Party Girl (1995).

High Summer II by Edvard Munch (1915)

The Kennedy Center has named its new dance director after firing its previous director, Jane Raleigh, and the two other programmers who made up the entire dance programming team on Thursday, the New York Times reported. The Kennedy Center United Arts Workers union said on Instagram that president Richard Grenell dismissed these employees without warning, consultation with senior artistic leadership, and cause. In Raleigh’s place now is Stephen Nakagawa, a former Washington Ballet dancer who, according to the NYT, wrote a Ietter to Grenell expressing his support for Trump and complaining about “radical leftist ideologies in ballet,” which is ultimately a hilarious phrase to me. He also reportedly expressed concern about the “rise of ‘woke’ culture” at Washington Ballet—the 11th largest ballet company in the U.S. by expenditures, according to Dance Data Project—and other companies.

Interestingly, in 2022, the company produced his own work, “Rising Sun,” a ballet inspired by Japanese culture that he created in 2020, “during the rise of violence against the AAPI community” to demonstrate “that the AAPI community is strong and beautiful.” This is not the only identity-forward work that a major company created in recent years: that same year, American Ballet Theatre debuted “Lifted,” a piece by Christopher Rudd which became the first production in the company’s history to have an entirely Black creative team and cast, as it aimed to “celebrate, amplify and highlight Black creative voices.”

Washington Ballet, similar to ABT, primarily puts on story ballets. Its 2025/2026 season includes The Nutcracker, Giselle, Cinderella, and just three days of a mixed-contemporary program featuring four contemporary works by male choreographers, two of which are by white male choreographers (perhaps unsurprisingly, the heavy-hitters Justin Peck and Christopher Wheeldon).

It’s unclear what Nakagawa is referring to when he points to “radical leftist ideologies” in ballet, or what that may mean for the future of the Center’s programming.

You might recall how earlier this year two Republican congressmen on the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party raised concerns about the programming of the National Ballet of China, writing that “art is a political instrument in the People’s Republic China [and] used for the purpose of disseminating propaganda abroad.” Interestingly, when two major Chinese companies, Shanghai Grand Theatre and Hong Kong Ballet, recently performed at Lincoln Center, both put on productions which explored themes including feminism, free will, and freedom. Anyway!

One of the Kennedy Center’s top officials has also resigned. Jeffrey Finn, senior vice president of artistic programming and vice president and executive producer of theater, was the Center’s lead employee overseeing theater programming. The New York Times reported his resignation, effective September 19, though he did not provide any public statement on his decision.

Meanwhile, the Kennedy Center will host the 2026 World Cup draw in December, Trump said last week, per the Washington Post.

The Trump administration, we’ve already discussed, has started an audit of the Smithsonian museums, and last week suggested that this could extend to other museums across the nation. A White House spokesperson told NPR: “President Trump will explore all options and avenues to get the Woke out of the Smithsonian and hold them accountable. He will start with the Smithsonian and then go from there.”

The White House also released an article titled “President Trump Is Right About the Smithsonian” which contains a bulleted list of exhibits and statements from Smithsonian museums that it takes issue with, including that Pilgrims were colonizers, that the U.S. is stolen land, and that the country’s founders “feared non-white immigration.” NPR points out that these points appear to be drawn from an earlier article published by The Federalist.

In response to these claims, NPR published statements from artists and scholars about this list of objectionable art. “My work is political, and that painting in particular was questioning the anti-immigrant sentiment of the time,” said artist Rigoberto A. Gonzalez, whose painting Refugees Crossing the Border Wall into South Texas was singled out in the post. “So I'm glad that it got a response from a presidency that is very clearly going anti-immigration.”

Over the past 20 years or so, the share of Americans who read for pleasure fell 40 percent, according to a study published last Wednesday. If this sounds a bit too hard to believe given the popularity of BookTok and Goodreads, you might consider that this research looks at the proportion of individuals reading for fun in the U.S.—which means that some people may be reading more, but it’s far fewer people doing that reading.

In order to encourage people to read, Denmark is ending its 25% sales tax on books—the highest in Europe—Le Monde reports. The country’s latest education report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (of which the U.S. is also a member) shows that nearly a quarter of Danish 15-year-olds “cannot understand a simple text, up four percentage points in a decade.”

One book that’s really popping in the UK—which has no sales tax on books—is Sally Carson’s Crooked Cross, a 1933 novel which was recently republished in April by Persephone Books, the New Yorker reports. The family portrait, set around the time it was published, details the rise of fascism in Europe. I’ll certainly be adding this to my TBR, as “novels written/set at the dawn of WWII” has become a favorite genre of mine as of late. I’d also recommend The Oppermanns by Lion Feuchtwanger (written in 1933) and Natalia Ginzberg’s All Our Yesterdays, set between 1939 to 1944, and published in 1952.

Criticism of France’s forthcoming loan of the Bayeaux Tapestry to the UK—which we discussed below the paywall last week—has continued, but French officials insist that the ancient textile will fare just fine in transport, according to studies that have produced detailed recommendations on how to move it, Le Monde reports.

Earlier this month, Berlin hosted the Young Euro Classic—a 17-day series of concerts performed by young musicians who “illustrate how they continue the artistic musical traditions of their home countries today.” One such ensemble that performed is the 51-member Afghan Youth Orchestra, which escaped to Europe when the Taliban seized power in 2021. Ahmad Sarmast, founder and director of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music was able to help 273 people associated with his school flee to Portugal before the institute in Kabul was destroyed, DW reports. "Every piece we play is in some way connected to the current situation in Afghanistan and the policies of the Taliban," Sarmast told the publication.

Stateside, the violinist John Shin, who has performed with the Utah Symphony, Ballet West, Utah Philharmonic, and more, has been detained by ICE reportedly because of a 2020 impaired driver conviction for which he successfully completed probation, Fox 13 Salt Lake City reported. His wife, U.S. citizen Danae Snow, started a GoFundMe for his legal fees and musicians have set up shop at the Utah State Capitol in protest of Shin’s detention. Shin came to the United States under his father’s student visa. His bond hearing is next week, after which his attorney hopes to secure him a green card.