The architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, which seems to get every big commission these days, has been selected for yet another one. Stanford University has chosen the firm to design its new home for the art and art history department, the university is to announce Thursday.

The 90,000-square-foot Burton and Deedee McMurtry Building will serve as an interdisciplinary arts hub and further develop the university’s “Arts District” at the entrance to the campus. The building was named in honor of two alumni who donated $30 million toward the project.

The building will consolidate the department’s programs in art practice, design, art history, film and media studies, and documentary film, which are currently dispersed on campus. In a statement, Mr. McMurtry praised Diller Scofidio + Renfro — which redesigned Lincoln Center — for its “creative process of exploration, experimentation and informed risk-taking.”

Located adjacent to the Cantor Arts Center, Stanford’s visual arts museum, the new building will contain studios, screening rooms, gallery spaces, classrooms and the art and architecture library. Construction is expected to begin in 2012.

Get out those dancing shoes. Lincoln Center has just announced the lineup for Midsummer Night Swing, its annual salsa, swing, disco, tango, Gypsy jazz and folk dancing festival that takes place under the stars. This year a new dance floor has been installed at the band shell in Damrosch Park on West 62nd Street.

A lottery, which you can enter at midsummernightswing.org, will be used to allocate tickets for opening night, Monday June 27. The next evening, the 28th, is a tribute to “Soul Train” with the saxophonist Pee Wee Ellis and the trombonist Fred Wesley along with Martha High and Fred Ross. Tyrone Proctor, an original “Soul Train” dancer will be on hand to instruct and Biz Markie will deejay.

Festival bands include the Rio samba singer Diogo Nogueira, Germany’s Ray Collins’ Hot Club, and the Palmetto Bug Stompers from New Orleans. On July 14, Bastille Day, there will be electro-swing from Paris with Caravan Palace and a French Revolution costume contest.

The Montreux Jazz Festival has lined up Seal, Santana and Sting for its 45th annual concert in July, organizers announced Tuesday, two days earlier than planned after leaks of the lineup appeared online, Reuters reported. They will join Susan Tedeschi, B.B. King, George Benson, Diana Krall and Dr. John for the musical gathering in Switzerland.

“There were leaks, but I can’t confirm we were hacked,” said Pascal Buchs, a festival spokesman.

Carlos Santana and John McLaughlin are scheduled to kick off the festival on July 1. Ricky Martin, Paolo Nutini, the Canadian indie rock band Arcade Fire and the jazz bassist Esperanza Spalding help to round out the bill. Sting’s July 11 concert, at which he will perform his greatest hits, is already sold out. The producer Quincy Jones, who directed the festival in previous years, will lead a concert honoring Miles Davis on July 13, with Herbie Hancock, Marcus Miller and Wayne Shorter.

For hip-hop fans, Coolio, Naughty by Nature, Digital Underground and House of Pain will appear on July 15. Deep Purple closes the festival, which is expected to draw 250,000, on July 16.

Two more events are scheduled to be announced on Thursday.

What’s the opposite of blerg? Whatever it is, Tina Fey has been enjoying it recently.

Chad Batka for The New York Times Tina Fey’s new book, “Bossypants,” is expected to be at the top of the nonfiction best-seller list later this month. Her secret to success: “No pigtails, no tube tops. Cry sparingly.”

Ms. Fey, the creator, writer and star of “30 Rock,” released her much-anticipated memoir, “Bossypants,” to mostly rapturous reviews. She went on Oprah – or Miss Oprah, as she calls her in the book – and announced that she was pregnant with her second child. And as a member of a recent panel of former “Saturday Night Live” stars, Ms. Fey also talked about being that show’s first female head writer.)

For a profile in Arts & Leisure, Ms. Fey discussed the unexpected challenges of writing her book, being a working mother (“juggling” is perhaps her least-favorite term)  and what she learned from playing Sarah Palin. But all Ms. Fey’s Liz Lemonisms cannot be contained in one place. Here are some additional excerpts from my interview with Ms. Fey in which she addresses being a boss, why there aren’t more funny movies built around women and how working at “30 Rock” is like working in a 19th-century industry.
 

Let me start by saying that I don’t think being bossy is a bad thing. Little girls are often called bossy. Were you bossy growing up?

  I was a little bit bossy but I don’t think I had that many people that I could boss. Mostly I was just, like, very rule-abiding. I’m still the kind of person, if I see someone cutting in line, it’s like, excuse me, what are you doing? I’ll get in fight in, like, the Easy Spirit on the Upper West Side, on someone’s behalf.
 

So how do you go from being so rule-abiding to being a leader? Read more…

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times Joel Grey and Sutton Foster in the Broadway revival of “Anything Goes.”

Broadway’s revival of “Anything Goes” won’t be going anywhere any time soon. On Wednesday, Roundabout Theater Company announced that its production of that Cole Porter musical, starring Sutton Foster as the evangelizing nightclub singer Reno Sweeney and Joel Grey as the milquetoast gangster Moonface Martin, will extend its run by about six months. The revival, directed and choreographed by Kathleen Marshall, is now planned to play at the Stephen Sondheim Theater through January 8; it was originally scheduled to close after July 31. (That’s roughly 184 more performances of cruise-ship based musical farce, so let’s hope everyone packed some additional swim trunks.) Reviewing this production of “Anything Goes” for The New York Times, Ben Brantley wrote that it “exudes the effervescence of a freshly poured gin fizz,” adding that when Ms. Foster “turns her toothy, triumphant smile on the audience there’s no doubt that she’s made many converts.”

The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission has sent the owner of the former Manufacturers Hanover Trust building back to the drawing board yet again to revise its renovation plans for the interior of the building on Fifth Avenue at 43rd Street. The interior was designated a landmark in February; the exterior has had that status since 1997.

The commission asked for changes at a hearing on Tuesday at which the owner, Vornado, presented a revised plan in response to the commission’s previous requests for adjustments to the interior of the 1954 building, originally designed by Gordon Bunshaft. The space is to contain a retail store, Joe Fresh.

Members of the commission commended the owners for restoring much of the interior, but several said they could approve only one door opening on Fifth Avenue (Vornado has proposed two). Others objected to moving the escalators to an east-west direction from the current north-south configuration.

From “Ladder to the Moon”

Barack Obama may be a polarizing figure on the grownup shelves at bookstores. But in the children’s books section, the president, first lady, the Obama girls and now, with the release of her first picture book, his half-sister, are greeted with near universal accolades and adoration. “Of Thee I Sing,” President Obama’s own picture book contribution, has already spent 20 weeks on our best-seller list.

From “Ladder to the Moon”

In today’s paper, Sheryl Gay Stolberg interviews Maya Soetoro-Ng, an Indonesian-born writer and educator who shares the same mother, Ann Dunham, with the 42nd president, on the occasion of the publication of her picture book debut. “Ladder to the Moon,” a large-format picture book, tells a story inspired by the author’s own daughter, born in 2004, and her desire to have known her grandmother, the late Ms. Dunham, who died ten years before her birth. “What was Grandma Annie like?” Little Suhaila asks her mother. “She was like the moon,” her mother replies. “Full, soft, and curious.”

In the book, Suhaila gets her wish when a magical golden ladder appears at her window, allowing her to journey forth in Grandma Annie’s company. Acrylic paintings by the Mexican-American illustrator Yuyi Morales create a magical realist, multicultural paradise of synagogues, churches and mosques, complete with winged children and earth mothers bearing soft-eyed babies in slings. “We’ll work together,” Grandma Annie says at one point. “We’ll throw in our hearts and minds, and work with our hands to make the land a little more kind.” And, the text reassures us, “For sure they would: together they’d build bridges and buildings and bonds between people.”

With a massive promotional campaign, including an appearance on The Today Show this week, Ms. Soetero-Ng’s book is probably bound for bestsellerdom. If not there’s always the next batch of Obama books: “First Garden: The White House Garden and How It Grew,” by Robbin Gourley (with a foreword by Alice Waters) also debuts this month.

“NCIS” delivered the largest audience in prime time on Tuesday as the procedural drama lifted CBS to No. 1 for the night even as the network trailed slightly during the 9 and 10 p.m. time slots. According to Nielsen’s estimates, 19.2 million viewers tuned in at 8 p.m. for “NCIS” on CBS; during the 9 p.m. hour, that network’s “NCIS: Los Angeles” (15.3 million) finished just slightly behind ABC’s “Dancing With the Stars” results episode (15.5 million). At 10,“Body of Proof” (11.3 million) on ABC edged “The Good Wife” on CBS (10.9 million). ABC placed second for the night, lagging behind at 8 with the second season premiere of “Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution” (5.3 million). NBC ranked third, averaging 7.2 million viewers for “The Biggest Loser” from 8 to 10, followed by “Parenthood” (5.1 million). Fox was a distant fourth among the networks with mostly reruns.

Two of Hollywood’s most progressive directors, James Cameron and Peter Jackson, are pushing forward with a new style of shooting that they say will make 3-D movies easier to watch. Film purists are likely to howl, and the majority of movie theaters don’t have compatible projection equipment.

On Monday Mr. Jackson caused a stir in cinema geek circles by announcing (via Facebook) that he is shooting “The Hobbit” at 48 frames per second, or twice the normal rate. Mr. Cameron has also been promoting use of the faster speed for his next two “Avatar” movies. Both men say that shooting at 48 frames per second makes a movie look more lifelike and lessens the eye strain that can come from 3-D presentation.

Why, if it’s so great, is Hollywood just starting to talk about it? Money. Movies have been shot at 24 frames per second since the 1920s because that rate “is the cheapest speed to achieve basic acceptable results,” Mr. Jackson explained in his Facebook post. Upgrading theater projection systems to play the faster speed is also costly; only a fraction of the screens in North America are expected to have compatible projectors by the time “The Hobbit” arrives in December 2012.

Tradition has also held back the adoption of 48-frame shooting: the slower speed is part of what gives movies their otherworldly quality. “Film purists will criticize,” Mr. Jackson wrote, “but all of our crew — many of whom are film purists — are now converts. You get used to this new look very quickly.”

Priska Ketterer/Lucerne Festival Bernard Haitink, center, conducted the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, who performed Monday in Lucerne with the Arnold Schoenberg Choir and the soloists Sally Matthews, left, and Christian Gerhaher, right.

LUCERNE, Switzerland — Lucerne is having a yearlong affair with Brahms. Through the various parts of the Lucerne Festival, Bernard Haitink has been conducting the Chamber Orchestra of Europe in a comprehensive Brahms cycle. During the piano festival in November, they presented the two piano concertos (with Emanuel Ax as soloist) and the two serenades. In the current Easter festival, they performed the second of three programs on Monday evening, and they offer the third on Wednesday. In the summer festival, in August, they will add two final concerts amid a smattering of Brahms performed by others (Claudio Abbado and the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, Christian Thielemann and the Dresden Staatskapelle).

But Lucerne is married to Brahms’s antipode, Wagner. Music-loving natives steer music-loving visitors to the venerable Hotel Schweizerhof, saying, “Wagner finished ‘Tristan und Isolde’ here.” (Twain, Tolstoy and others wrote here, too, but as you may judge from the present evidence, the rooms come with no guarantee of inspiration.) Wagner completed “Tristan” during a five-month stay in 1859. The views of snow-capped peaks across the lake, Mounts Rigi and Pilatus, may also have helped refine his notion of Valhalla for the “Ring” cycle. Read more…