University of Cincinnati history professor Mark A. Lause likes to rub the rough spots in American history, the places where the story doesn’t go the expected way. His previous books include Race and Radicalism in the Union Army, on the successes and struggles of mixed black, Indigenous and white army units, and The Antebellum Crisis and America’s First Bohemians, on the alternative culture and politics that bloomed in New York while war clouds gathered. In his new book, The Great Cowboy Strike: Bullets, Ballots and Class Conflicts in the American West, he looks at that mythical independent contractor, the cowboy living off the land with no social obligations and immediate access to justice in his holster.

The story goes like this: once upon a time, in 1967, Canada was a happy place where architects were important. Even prime ministers would come to visit them and ask what the country should do for its birthday. The architects thought about it and said that Canada should build a planetarium. And Canada did, and the Vancouver Planetarium and Museum was a great planetarium, and everybody was very happy. And the architects were happiest of all.

Anxiety over foreign takeovers is nothing new in the corporate world, where buyers from abroad have scooped up everything from Canadian Club to the Timbit. So maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that the wave of high-profile outsiders who have been hired to oversee some of Canada’s largest art and cultural institutions has also led to similar bouts of nationalist hand-wringing.

In this cleverly Brexit-timed release, Gillingham, an emeritus professor at the London School of Economics, attempts to counter the narrative of easy and inevitable European integration by looking at incongruous moments from EU history. He assesses the present crises (refugees and economic stagnation), names the most important future one (sovereign debt) and pronounces the patient dead.

It was just supposed to be an opera review, but in some people’s eyes it has left the Canadian Opera Company looking mercilessly petty and the National Post looking worse. On May 3, Arthur Kaptainis, the well-known critic for the Montreal Gazette and the Post, filed a piece on the COC’s Maometto II, an opera by Rossini. When it ran, Jennifer Pugsley, a press representative for the COC, emailed Dustin Parkes, executive producer of arts and culture at the National Post, officially to correct two errors, but really to complain about Kaptainis.

To reveal the hidden potentials of buildings and cities, we need someone who sees them another way, someone who walks through walls and uses the roof instead of the front door. Though most burglars are dull opportunists who fail to live up to this promise, this book is interested in the ones with insight into architecture.

“Most of us now understand that architecture is the least suitable instrument with which to achieve social justice,” Museum of Modern Art curator Arthur Drexler said in 1975. That quote could be the antithesis of this book, which looks at the 1960s and 1970s as a period when governments were brave enough to experiment and architecture could claim to improve social and spatial organization.

Architect Berthold Lubetkin’s motto still carries an electric charge, which may be why it is so hard to buy this quote on a tea towel. “Keep calm and carry on,” on the other hand, sounds like the soporific for our time, and it can be found on everything from wallets to underwear, doormats to pillows. Created by the British government for use in the event of a German invasion during the Second World War, it had a renaissance during the financial collapse of 2008.

There have always been people who refuse to forget, and this is a book for them. The debut novel by a young Russian journalist and poet is about a journey to the Gulag, a search for history that few want to talk about, told through a search for the origins of an old man. Called Grandfather II, he grafts himself onto the narrator’s family and tries to claim the young boy as a replacement for a lost son.

Last week, Richard Reed Parry and Bryce Dessner’s Wave Movements had its North American premiere in the Egyptian galleries at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Where? “Left, after the tomb.”) After performances in London and Edinburgh earlier this year, the composers (respectively, members of rock groups The National and Arcade Fire) heard musicians from the New York Philharmonic perform their composition accompanied with a film by Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto, who repurposed his famous 1980s black-and-white seascapes for the project.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the largest private foundation in the world, with an endowment valued around US$41 billion—with Warren Buffett and Gates pledging much of their fortunes, it will grow bigger—and a total annual grant of around $4 billion. This puts it in the same weight category as the World Health Organization—if the WHO’s budget were controlled by one couple. McGoey’s new book is a timely criticism of a society that allows an individual to accumulate such a distorting amount of financial power; it is an indictment of unaccountable power in general and of the Gates Foundation in particular.

Was there a bomb on the ship? No. Why would you need a bomb? The ship was a bomb. Yet two-thirds on-board survived, so, by Zeppelin standards, the Hindenburg disaster was not particularly disastrous—but it was the first to be filmed and widely broadcast.

The original plot of Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte makes leaps that may have been difficult to follow back in the 18th century when it was written. Two men bet that their fiancées are faithful, then test the women by trying to seduce them in disguise. When they eventually succeed it proves the saying of the opera’s title, “so do all,” i.e., all women are unfaithful. A nice 21st-century idea. A brand new adaptation of Cosi just premiered in Banff. A Little Too Cozy proves that a historic work can be translated for contemporary audiences without losing its soul, but it’s so good that it ends up asking another question: is adapting classics the best opera can do today?

Insomnia is a state of nervous distraction, an inability to focus and a craving for new stimuli that happens to make sleep impossible. This slim book roams through ideas about the disorder with the obsessive circular thinking of a sufferer. It is a fascinating and bleak portrait of the insomniac mind kicking against the same question one night after another, unable to stop asking: why me?

We have an idea in the 21st century that capitalism is the market, and that both are naturally opposed to bureaucracy, which is the state. This dense little book is an attack on that complacent thinking, and it continues some of the arguments that brought Graeber prominence for Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Both books belong to an anthropological tradition that takes approaches normally reserved for weird foreigners and applies them to Western culture, with electric results.

That’s the problem with looking for Atlantis, beginning with which parts of Plato’s fourth-hand account you take literally. He describes a city of concentric circles in a landscape near the pillars of Heracles—Gibraltar, probably—that includes man-made earthworks 10 times bigger than the Panama Canal. Then he breaks off mid-sentence. How you translate a word of ancient Greek makes the difference between a convincing argument for locating Atlantis in a national park in Spain or on the island of Malta, and a series of contradictions becomes evidence if you decide that a hieroglyph for 100 was mistranslated into Greek as 1,000. It’s that simple.

Fort McMurray has a bad reputation. En route from Montreal, a visitor is warned about the place: “There’s a lot of booze,” a knitting grandmother says, voice dropping to a whisper, “and drugs.” Boom towns and oil sands have unhealthy associations for good reasons, too. From the air, though, Alberta’s Fort McMurray isn’t Mordor; it looks like a lush valley where two rivers meet.

You might have to climb a mountain to see the unprecedented variety in opera today. Our major companies stick to expensive productions of classics on huge stages and survive on private donations, but getting 80 per cent of funding from fickle individual donors is insane—just ask the ghosts of New York City Opera, Opera Boston, Opera Cleveland, San Antonio Opera or Lyric Opera San Diego. Then there are the small companies.

In a traditional biology experiment, the subjects are clueless. If someone in the maze favours left turns, researchers only care if it affects future experiments. They are not concerned with the daily lives of mice. But those daily lives inspired the “Scientists for Love” and their inaugural public experiment in Montreal, “speed-dating for the senses (and the sensitive),” which used sensory deprivation to introduce 14 men and 14 women to each other, and to themselves.

The National Arts Centre Orchestra (NACO) had released its last recording 10 years earlier when pianist Angela Hewitt approached it in 2012 with the Hyperion label on board. She had started recording the Mozart piano concertos and was changing orchestras—were they interested? She might well have come in on a white steed. Orchestral recording has suffered from the collapse of the music industry. NACO first clarinet Kimball Sykes explains, “It’s more normal not to be recording than to be recording these days.”

New York City Opera artistic director George Steel hopped out of the rowboat and reported that “the geese were very interested in the bass section.” This is as it should have been for the aquatic sound test of R. Murray Schafer’s Music for Wilderness Lake and Credo a few weeks before their New York premiere on June 21 at the 7th Make Music New York (MMNY) festival. Based on France’s Fête de la musique, MMNY began experimenting on Central Park Lake in 2010 with Iannis Xenakis’s sextet Persephassa, written for an audience surrounded by percussionists. They performed it with the musicians on rafts and the audience in rowboats and have used the lake every year since. This year, the daylong festival presents more than a thousand events in all the boroughs.

It is the centennial of the premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, with all the accompanying fanfare, and the reek of hyperbole can make it hard for a sober person to read a concert program. Rite was, according to American conductor Marin Alsop, “the most complex music ever conceived.” “You can hear everything in it,” the Russian conductor Vladimir Jurowski said. Leonard Bernstein called it “the most important piece of music of the 20th century” and this retrospective sentiment of the instant masterpiece has gone down as smoothly and comfortingly as if Rite floated across the Atlantic like a digestive biscuit on the first merit-powered ocean crossing.