Last week, Valerie Macon became the poet laureate of North Carolina. Valerie Macon is a disability claims processor with no major publications who was picked singlehandedly by the governor. And you still can't get the slush-pile intern at Copper Canyon Press to answer your goddamn emails.

Alarming news for music lovers: the New York City Opera, which has performed in the city for generations, will have to cancel the rest of its season and all of next year's season if it doesn't raise $20 million soon. A tragedy, for the arts. Still, no one should give the opera $20 million.

Well well well, despite a lot of cheap jokes from certain precincts of the internet where unhappy people dwell, it turns out that people who graduate from college with degrees in easy, fake fields may, in fact, be the smart ones after all.

Douglas Britt (pictured) is the "Society/ visual arts writer" at the Houston Chronicle. And he's extremely busy! So he sent out the following 15-point email to "every gallerist/cultural group in Houston," our tipster says. Print out a copy, and memorize!

Things I Did On My July 4th Vacation: hit up The New Museum's Younger Than Jesus exhibition. It's a contemporary art exhibit showcasing only artists born after 1976. It ends today. Here is what I saw, presented without comment.

Annie Proulx's short story about gay mountain love reached millions when it became an Oscar-winning hit movie in 2005. And it refuses to go away! "The New York City Opera commissioned Charles Wuorinen to compose an opera based on 'Brokeback Mountain,' the 1997 short story by Annie Proulx... The opera is scheduled to…

"Altria" (makers of Virginia Slims, Marlboros, and, mmm, Parliaments, the cigarettes of Jackie Onassis™) is, sort of, packing up and leaving for Europe. Their new focus on the production of tobacco across the Atlantic may destroy the economies of several of those states south of here that we don't go to—and it also…