2. Clayton Fox: “The Toxic Gentleness of the American Theatre,” Tablet, 9/5/23. As with a couple of the references I included in “Where Are We?” (6/10/22), my fellow liberals will have to man up and allow that some arguments from conservative sources may have validity. Though I would rather that Fox had avoided “toxic” (another candidate for retirement), “Woke Bolshevists,” etc., I can’t find a thing to disagree with in his pungently written piece, which is well informed on the history of the American regional theatre movement, its current artistic condition (a “confused, flattened, and fearful shadow of its former self”), its economic predicament, and the fallout of the BIPOC offensive I wrote about in real time in The Racial Moment. 

3. Jerry A. Coyne & Luana Maroja: “The Ideological Subversion of Biology,” The Skeptical Inquirer, July/August, 2023. In this paper, two highly qualified scientific researchers and teachers detail how their field (evolutionary and organismal biology) is being “impeded or misrepresented by [progressive] ideology,” threatening an “erosion of free inquiry in science.” For my readers, I will be content with its unarguable presentation of the distinction between sex (binary and fixed), and gender or “gender identity.” On a video interview hosted by The Skeptical Inquirer, the authors were asked why they were seemingly not concerned about the censorious pressures coming from the Right. Coyne’s answer was directly applicable to the situation in the arts: simply that in their particular field of expertise and responsibility (the specter of creationism having been vanquished—but he may have spoken too soon on that), it happens to be coming from the Left.

4. Adam B. Coleman: “Why the diversity-industrial complex bubble burst,” New York Post, 8/3/23. Coleman’s piece deals with the infusion of DEI influence into the corporate sector. I will leave to you the question of how heavily the tabloid source figures into your personal evaluation of his presentation, and I cannot vouch for the jobs stats he cites, compiled by Linked In. But I take as at least roughly accurate his picture of a DEI boom followed by a significant recent retraction owing to the impossibility of measuring results gained for money spent, a problem that adheres to these initiatives across the board.

5. Michael Paulson: “A Crisis in America’s Theaters Leaves Prestigious Stages Dark,” New York Times, 7/23/23. This is the broadest in scope of these articles: Paulson, the NYT‘s theatre reporter, interviewed 72 Artistic Directors across the country, and coherently summarizes their responses. This is a good one to pursue down through the readers’ many comments, always with the awareness that comments and letters come from those most motivated, and thus are not necessarily representative of the audience as a whole.

6: Michael Paulson: “Hitting Theater Hard: The Loss of Subscribers Who Went to Everything,” NYT, 8/29/23. The emphasis here is in the title, and we might note that while Danny (“The single ticket buyer is your enemy”) Newman, the longtime PR man of the Chicago Lyric Opera, did not invent the subscription model, he was its single most powerful advocate, and all the implications of the virtual disintegration of that model apply in force to the operatic situation.