Joseph Cermatori

Yum! Happy Thanksgiving to you too.

Nice work, @jamellebouie.net!

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Wow. Harvard nuking its PhD programs

- Science PhD admissions reduced by more than 75%
- Arts & Humanities reduced by about 60%
- Social Sciences by 50–70%
- History by 60%
- Biology by 75%
- The German department will lose all PhD seats
- Sociology from six PhD students to zero

UNTIL IT’S DONE, Ep. 4: Sylvia Rivera

In the 1970s, queer New Yorkers had been pushed to the margins of NYC. Our trans neighbors faced immense cruelty. But in Sylvia Rivera, they found a champion.

As we combat Trump’s politics of darkness, her legacy can light the path forward.

Hear, hear.

@chronicle.com

The Death of the Full-Time Critic and What It Means for the Future of Art Writing If we let art criticism become an exclusive club for the well-connected and well-funded, we risk creating an echo chamber that flatters power rather than interrogates it.

“The crisis in criticism is not just about fewer jobs but about the intellectual health of of our culture. If we let art criticism become an exclusive club for the well-connected and well-funded, we risk creating an echo chamber that flatters power...” @nyobserver.bsky.social #artswriting #criticism

More UChicago Ph.D. Programs Will Pause Admissions The arts and humanities dean said “nearly all” faculty leaders preferred “a broader pause for the division.” Some social sciences programs also aren’t accepting new students.

“UChicago is just one of multiple highly selective universities—including Boston University and the University of Pennsylvania—that have announced over the past year that they were freezing or scaling back Ph.D. admissions and programs amid financial pressures and other factors.”

The Crisis of the University Started Long Before Trump The University of Chicago is in crisis. Under extraordinary financial strain, it has diminished its faculty-student ratio and hired hundreds of “lecturers”: teachers whom it pays little and whom it do...

Dispatch from the University of Chicago: “The university’s trustees and leaders view it preeminently as a tax-free technology incubator, and its debt load is so great that it is abandoning ideals it once held dear in order to sustain that goal. We are simply choosing not to be a university.”

Portait of the sculptor Alessandro Vittoria, Giovanni Battista Moroni, 1551-1552, oil on canvas, 87.5 cm × 70 cm (34.4 in × 28 in), Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. #portraiture #arthistory #moroni

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Grateful for the glimpses I had of his world, however fleeting. He was a great light in darkness.

(14/14)
And Bob appears near the end of 'Baroque Modernity' (pp. 185–86)...
A passage that allowed me space to reflect on his monumental presence in the contemporary theater — and on all that Watermill summer had stirred up in me. #BaroqueModernity #baroque

(13/14)
...a meditation on grief and grace. That short review is available online here < bit.ly/4514Tkb >.

(12/14)
But I was fortunate to have the chance to write about him several times. For 'PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art,' I reviewed 'Adam’s Passion' (2015), a visionary music-theater collaboration with Arvo Pärt inspired by the Biblical tale of Adam...

(11/14)
On the rehearsal stage, while he was demonstrating the precise and elegant gestures he desired from his actors, he seemed oracular, otherworldly.

(10/14)
Although I got to observe Bob's rehearsals for a fortnight, I only got to meet him once or twice. He could be stern and forbidding in person.

(9/14)
And as recently as March of this year, his work commanded attention: I'm so grateful I had the chance to see 'Mary Said What She Said' (his latest collaboration with Darryl Pinckney and Isabelle Huppert) when it played at NYU's Skirball Center. @nyuskirball.bsky.social

(8/14)
And then — what an experience it was to see the revival of 'Einstein on the Beach' live at BAM @bambrooklyn.bsky.social in 2012. Another revelation.

(7/14)
These melodies were composed when opera was in its infancy, when Shakespeare was alive and walking the earth — and they were now being reimagined by Wilson, whose work André Breton had once praised as “the baroque of the future.”

(6/14)
In the opera's famous ritornello, I felt I could hear its heartbeat: act and repetition, birth and rebirth, death and immortality, all echoing each other in a musical pulse.

(5/14)
That summer during the evenings, I’d sometimes walk along the Long Island shoreline, score in hand, with Monteverdi’s ghostly strains on repeat through my iPod.

(4/14)
...to observe two weeks of rehearsals of Monteverdi's 1607 opera 'L'Orfeo,' which Wilson was preparing for a new production at La Scala.

(3/14)
By August 2008, with the generous help of Princeton University librarian John Logan and his sister Margaret Logan, I'd found my way to Wilson's Watermill Center in the Hamptons…

(2/14)
I first encountered his work as a student, when I saw his production of Ibsen's 'Peer Gynt' at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2006. To call that experience revelatory wouldn't begin to do it justice; I was instantly obsessed.

(1/14)
So many tributes these past few days in honor of Robert Wilson (1941–2025) — widely hailed as the most significant American theater director of his generation. Here’s a memorial thread. #RobertWilson #avantgarde #contrmporary #opera #performance #theaterhistory #theater #InMemoriam

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We should be ok then: