Culture

Taylor Swift Buys Back Rights to Her Old Music
Taylor Swift Buys Back Rights to Her Old Music

Pop icon Taylor Swift, who has been publicly feuding with record executives since 2019 over the rights to her early music, now owns her entire catalogue, she said on her website Friday. "All of the music I've ever made ... now belongs ... to me," she wrote, after years of dispute over her first six albums, a number of which she has rerecorded to ...

'We Love It': Marseille Discovers New Banksy Artwork
'We Love It': Marseille Discovers New Banksy Artwork

A new mural depicting a lighthouse by world-famous street artist Banksy has appeared on a wall in the southern French city of Marseille, with AFP confirming its location on Friday. The anonymous artist known as Banksy revealed the new work on Instagram on Thursday, but its location had not been disclosed. The words "I want to be what you ...

‘La Dolce Vita’  or Fellini’s Prophetic Vision
Story‘La Dolce Vita’ or Fellini’s Prophetic Vision

When it was released in 1960, La Dolce Vita caused a stir. The film disrupted cinema, unsettled Italian society, and changed how we understand what a film can express. Yet this masterpiece by Federico Fellini was not born out of serenity or control. It emerged from the tumult of late 1950s Rome, where nights seemed more intense than ...

African Art Reimagined at Met Museum’s Revamped Wing
African Art Reimagined at Met Museum’s Revamped Wing

From a delicate 13th-century clay figure to self-portraits by photographer Samuel Fosso, New York's Metropolitan Museum reopens its African art collection on Saturday, exploring the "complexity" of the past and looking to the present. After a four-year renovation with a $70 million price tag, the reopening of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing comes ...

Maria Grazia Chiuri Steps Down as Dior Women’s Artistic Director
Maria Grazia Chiuri Steps Down as Dior Women’s Artistic Director

Dior announced Thursday that Italian designer Maria Grazia Chiuri was stepping down as artistic director of the French fashion house's women's collection after almost a decade on the job. Dior has boomed since Chiuri took over in 2016, becoming the second-biggest brand in the stable of luxury labels owned by French powerhouse LVMH. Her ...

'Sex and the City' Stars Shine Bright After 50
'Sex and the City' Stars Shine Bright After 50

Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte are back in heels and back in action for season three of And Just Like That, the follow-up to the iconic series Sex and the City. The show continues to make the case that “life doesn’t end after 50.” The emotional, professional, and romantic adventures of the three New Yorkers unfold across twelve new ...

Bérénice Between Two Languages: A Foreign Queen on the French Stage
Bérénice Between Two Languages: A Foreign Queen on the French Stage

The play Bérénice at the Lavoir Moderne Parisien is co-directed by Marie Benati and Sanae Assif. Love exists in exile across ninety intense minutes, during which Racine’s unyielding verses intertwine with their poetic Arabic translation. The cast—Sanae Assif, Ghina Daou, Edouard Dossetto, Leslie Gruel, Adam Karoutchi, and Majd ...

Eurovision 2025: 166 Million Viewers, Record Audiences, and Viral Peaks
Eurovision 2025: 166 Million Viewers, Record Audiences, and Viral Peaks

The Eurovision Song Contest confirmed its place as the world's biggest live televised music event, with 166 million viewers in 37 countries watching the 2025 edition, organizers said Wednesday. Three million more people watched this year's 69th edition in Basel, Switzerland, than last year's contest in Malmo, Sweden, said the European ...

AI Is Not a Threat, It's The Future of Music, Says Spotify CEO Daniel Ek
AI Is Not a Threat, It's The Future of Music, Says Spotify CEO Daniel Ek

Artificial intelligence will encourage more people to create music in the future and is not a threat to the industry, the co-founder and CEO of streaming giant Spotify said. Artists using machine-learning tools to produce music have given rise to concerns about whether AI-generated music  - even entirely fake artists - could one day replace ...

Brigitte, Macron and the Republican Fantasy: Analyzing a Viral Moment
AnalysisBrigitte, Macron and the Republican Fantasy: Analyzing a Viral Moment

Certain gestures exceed their expected boundaries and unsettle the scene in which they occur. Brigitte Macron’s gesture, filmed as she stepped off a plane in Hanoi on May 25, is a striking example. This fleeting moment—interpreted alternately as a slap or a simple sign of complicity—ignited a torrent of interpretations. Beyond ...

Shakespeare’s 'King Lear' Rocks Tehran with Beat and Passion
Shakespeare’s 'King Lear' Rocks Tehran with Beat and Passion

An Iranian director is bringing a jolt of energy to King Lear, staging the Shakespearean tragedy in Persian in Tehran with electrifying rock music and dazzling lights to draw in younger crowds. In Iran, artists, writers, filmmakers, musicians, and playwrights constantly walk a fine line to avoid censorship of content considered inappropriate by ...