We really don't want to lose the arts

Former Chicago Opera Theater artistic director Lidya Yankovskaya, with whom I have worked several times, has started moving to London because she doesn't want her children to grow up in the anti-humanities environment the United States is becoming:

“I want to be sure that my children can grow up feeling like they can always express themselves freely. I want my children to live in a society that really takes care of its people. I want my children to live in a world that really values things like the arts, that really values things like education,” she told WBEZ on a recent Zoom call from Sydney, where she has been leading Georges Bizet’s classic “Carmen” at the Sydney Opera House. “In London in particular, there is such a culture of valuing intellectualism, of valuing the arts and artistic pursuits for their own sake.”

As I'm no longer eligible for the kinds of highly-skilled migrant visas I could get 15 years ago from Europe and the UK, I am a bit envious. But I also understand her completely, and if I had kids, I might also make more of a concerted effort to go somewhere closer to my values.

Two more nuggets about the end of the United States as a functioning country:

• Perry Bacon argues that major institutions like CBS and Brown University have caved to the OAFPOTUS is that they kinda-sorta agree with him on a lot of things, like labor rights and DEI.
• The New York Times' chief economics correspondent, Ben Casselman, examines what happened to other regimes that meddled with their data-gathering institutions. But that's not surprising given the OAFPOTUS's continent-shattering ignorance of basic economics.

Well, that's enough optimism and cheer for one afternoon! Time to get back to my real job.