AJ Four Ways: Text Only (by date) | headlines only
DANCE
IDEAS
- Names off, names on
Good Morning,
Three reversals to start with. A federal judge ordered Trump’s name removed from the Kennedy Center and halted the planned two-year closure. The NYT Breaks down what’s next (The New York Times). Meanwhile, Trump’s “Freedom 250” celebration of the country’s birthday is unraveling so completely — nearly every musician has pulled out — that he now reportedly wants to cancel it (The New York Times). And Tennessee’s attempt to pull Roots from school libraries under its book-banning law has been blocked, for now (Salon).
Three obituaries today, each for a woman whose work built an institution without her name above the door. Claude Bessy ran the Paris Opera Ballet School for thirty years (The New York Times). Marcia Lucas co-edited the first Star Wars and Jedi and quietly rescued Spielberg and Scorsese films along the way (The Hollywood Reporter). And Hong Kong photographer Nancy Sheung portrayed women as autonomous and audacious in the 1960s, when the cultural script said otherwise (The New York Times).
Meanwhile, the AI corrosion file grows: Amazon is making an AI-animated Good Advice Cupcake without its creator (Wired), TikTok scammers are using AI blackface to push cheap junk (The Verge), and The Atlantic identifies the universal AI-writing tell: “perfectly clean, without a stray comma,,” (The Atlantic).
All of our stories below. See you tomorrow.
Doug
- Saying No To New Gadgets Might Make Us Happier
Just in case you’ve missed multiple strains of philosophy, ethics, and “happiness studies” over the years, not to mention Buddhist thought, well: “When we encounter something new, we get a dopamine hit. … But sometimes novelty seduces us without offering anything meaningful.” – Fast Company
- The Kansas City Symphony Wants To Add A New, Separate, Non-Classical Performance Space
Why? “The possibility of generating year-round sustaining revenue for an orchestra.” – KC Studio
- We Knew Heated Rivalry’s Shane Was A Reader, But The Actor Playing Him Has Even Better Taste In Books
“Williams is rarely spotted without a book in his hand. He’s now name-checked multiple Joan Didion titles in interviews, and was once photographed next to a copy of Knausgaard’s My Struggle. His personal motto comes from Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables.” And his selections sell very well. – LitHub
- Claude Bessy, Who Ruled The Paris Ballet School, Has Died At 93
Bessy was “a graceful French ballet star whose firm hand at the helm of the Paris Opera Ballet School for three decades made it one of the world’s top dance institutions, though her rigorous methods eventually drew stinging criticism.” – The New York Times
ISSUES
- Museum Gift Stores Have Always Been A Little Special, But They’ve Leveled Up
“Rather than an exit point, this new wave of merchandising is quickly turning museum gift shops into a desirable entry point. Curated edits … are now beginning to treat them as a stand-alone shopping destination, marking a shift from cultural institution to cultural retailer.” – The Guardian (UK)
- The Serious Business Of Creating Illustrations For Children
“For years, illustrators have been overlooked, seen as people who come in and do the decorating after the house has been built. But this couldn’t be further from the truth.” – The Guardian (UK)
- The Art Looter Who Supplied Museums
Latchford’s success depended not just on criminal networks that supplied and transported these objects, but on the willingness of museums, dealers, collectors, and scholars to accept fragmented or problematic provenance so long as the objects themselves retained the aura of rarity and beauty. – Hyperallergic
- Gehry Partners Will Work On Renovation Of The Getty Center
Gehry Partners will design a variety of upgrades to the Getty Center — including a major revamp of its entry experience — during its upcoming year-long closure, the museum announced Thursday. – Los Angeles Times
- ARTnews Lists “The 100 Best Artworks About America”
“What, exactly, defines America? It’s a question that’s been asked for more than two centuries, and it’s unlikely to be conclusively answered anytime soon. But, with the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding fast approaching, we took the occasion to hash out a response to that query, using art as a guide.” – ARTnews
MEDIA
- The Five Top Takeaways From The Kennedy Center Ruling
And yes, we sure do mean the Kennedy Center. – The New York Times
- The Creator Of This Animated Cupcake Is Furious At Buzzfeed’s GenAI Plan
Remember when Jonah Peretti of Buzzfeed seemed like a good guy? That was a long time ago, and we were all so much more innocent, including the creator of Good Advice Cupcake: “I trusted them, though naively, when they said they had no interest in continuing Cuppy without me.” – Wired
- On TikTok, Scammers Are Using AI Blackface To Push Cheap Products
Those belt buckles sure aren’t handmade. And: “Nearly all aspects of the accounts appear to be AI-generated — from the ‘person’ in the video to automated responses to comments, which in some cases attempt to mimic African American vernacular.” – The Verge
- Federal Judge Orders Trump To Take His Name Off The Kennedy Center
A federal judge Friday ordered that President Donald Trump’s name be removed from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and that officials halt its plan to close the venue for two years. – Washington Post
- Universities Rethink The SAT
“We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics, and other quantitatively demanding fields,” the professors write in an open letter to the Board of Regents. – The Wall Street Journal
MUSIC
- We Knew Heated Rivalry’s Shane Was A Reader, But The Actor Playing Him Has Even Better Taste In Books
“Williams is rarely spotted without a book in his hand. He’s now name-checked multiple Joan Didion titles in interviews, and was once photographed next to a copy of Knausgaard’s My Struggle. His personal motto comes from Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables.” And his selections sell very well. – LitHub
- Tennessee’s Latest Attempt At Banning – This Time Of Roots – Has Failed, For Now
“Under the totalitarian Age-Appropriate Materials Act — a Tennessee law passed in 2022 that, along with an addendum passed two years later, has permitted the removal of hundreds of books from libraries throughout the state — the Knox County school district recently ordered the removal of Alex Haley’s novel.” – Salon
- A Novel Twenty Years In The Making
“If you work on a book for twenty years—whatever we mean by work—people really act like you’re very neurotic. Like there’s something wrong with you, or you’re doing something wrong—and it’s easy to internalize that.” – Paris Review
- English Can Be A Weird Language. That’s Why It’s Perfect For Competitive Spelling Bees.
Sure, there are some other languages whose speakers have spelling contests, but there are plenty — Italian, Finnish, Malay, etc. — whose words are spelled exactly as they’re pronounced. But English? In what other language could “ough” be pronounced eight different ways, depending on the word? – The New York Times Magazine
- The Publishing Industry Is Very Vulnerable To AI
The book-publishing industry had already been wrestling with the prospect of a flood of AI-authored texts in the fiction market, and now the Rosenbaum scandal was showing the way AI could blow a hole in the nonfiction sector, too. – New York Magazine
PEOPLE
- Names off, names on
Good Morning,
Three reversals to start with. A federal judge ordered Trump’s name removed from the Kennedy Center and halted the planned two-year closure. The NYT Breaks down what’s next (The New York Times). Meanwhile, Trump’s “Freedom 250” celebration of the country’s birthday is unraveling so completely — nearly every musician has pulled out — that he now reportedly wants to cancel it (The New York Times). And Tennessee’s attempt to pull Roots from school libraries under its book-banning law has been blocked, for now (Salon).
Three obituaries today, each for a woman whose work built an institution without her name above the door. Claude Bessy ran the Paris Opera Ballet School for thirty years (The New York Times). Marcia Lucas co-edited the first Star Wars and Jedi and quietly rescued Spielberg and Scorsese films along the way (The Hollywood Reporter). And Hong Kong photographer Nancy Sheung portrayed women as autonomous and audacious in the 1960s, when the cultural script said otherwise (The New York Times).
Meanwhile, the AI corrosion file grows: Amazon is making an AI-animated Good Advice Cupcake without its creator (Wired), TikTok scammers are using AI blackface to push cheap junk (The Verge), and The Atlantic identifies the universal AI-writing tell: “perfectly clean, without a stray comma,,” (The Atlantic).
All of our stories below. See you tomorrow.
Doug
- Saying No To New Gadgets Might Make Us Happier
Just in case you’ve missed multiple strains of philosophy, ethics, and “happiness studies” over the years, not to mention Buddhist thought, well: “When we encounter something new, we get a dopamine hit. … But sometimes novelty seduces us without offering anything meaningful.” – Fast Company
- The Kansas City Symphony Wants To Add A New, Separate, Non-Classical Performance Space
Why? “The possibility of generating year-round sustaining revenue for an orchestra.” – KC Studio
- We Knew Heated Rivalry’s Shane Was A Reader, But The Actor Playing Him Has Even Better Taste In Books
“Williams is rarely spotted without a book in his hand. He’s now name-checked multiple Joan Didion titles in interviews, and was once photographed next to a copy of Knausgaard’s My Struggle. His personal motto comes from Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables.” And his selections sell very well. – LitHub
- Claude Bessy, Who Ruled The Paris Ballet School, Has Died At 93
Bessy was “a graceful French ballet star whose firm hand at the helm of the Paris Opera Ballet School for three decades made it one of the world’s top dance institutions, though her rigorous methods eventually drew stinging criticism.” – The New York Times
PEOPLE
- Names off, names on
Good Morning,
Three reversals to start with. A federal judge ordered Trump’s name removed from the Kennedy Center and halted the planned two-year closure. The NYT Breaks down what’s next (The New York Times). Meanwhile, Trump’s “Freedom 250” celebration of the country’s birthday is unraveling so completely — nearly every musician has pulled out — that he now reportedly wants to cancel it (The New York Times). And Tennessee’s attempt to pull Roots from school libraries under its book-banning law has been blocked, for now (Salon).
Three obituaries today, each for a woman whose work built an institution without her name above the door. Claude Bessy ran the Paris Opera Ballet School for thirty years (The New York Times). Marcia Lucas co-edited the first Star Wars and Jedi and quietly rescued Spielberg and Scorsese films along the way (The Hollywood Reporter). And Hong Kong photographer Nancy Sheung portrayed women as autonomous and audacious in the 1960s, when the cultural script said otherwise (The New York Times).
Meanwhile, the AI corrosion file grows: Amazon is making an AI-animated Good Advice Cupcake without its creator (Wired), TikTok scammers are using AI blackface to push cheap junk (The Verge), and The Atlantic identifies the universal AI-writing tell: “perfectly clean, without a stray comma,,” (The Atlantic).
All of our stories below. See you tomorrow.
Doug
- Saying No To New Gadgets Might Make Us Happier
Just in case you’ve missed multiple strains of philosophy, ethics, and “happiness studies” over the years, not to mention Buddhist thought, well: “When we encounter something new, we get a dopamine hit. … But sometimes novelty seduces us without offering anything meaningful.” – Fast Company
- The Kansas City Symphony Wants To Add A New, Separate, Non-Classical Performance Space
Why? “The possibility of generating year-round sustaining revenue for an orchestra.” – KC Studio
- We Knew Heated Rivalry’s Shane Was A Reader, But The Actor Playing Him Has Even Better Taste In Books
“Williams is rarely spotted without a book in his hand. He’s now name-checked multiple Joan Didion titles in interviews, and was once photographed next to a copy of Knausgaard’s My Struggle. His personal motto comes from Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables.” And his selections sell very well. – LitHub
- Claude Bessy, Who Ruled The Paris Ballet School, Has Died At 93
Bessy was “a graceful French ballet star whose firm hand at the helm of the Paris Opera Ballet School for three decades made it one of the world’s top dance institutions, though her rigorous methods eventually drew stinging criticism.” – The New York Times
THEATRE
VISUAL
- Saying No To New Gadgets Might Make Us Happier
Just in case you’ve missed multiple strains of philosophy, ethics, and “happiness studies” over the years, not to mention Buddhist thought, well: “When we encounter something new, we get a dopamine hit. … But sometimes novelty seduces us without offering anything meaningful.” – Fast Company
- The Biggest AI Writing Tell
The prose – whether in a text or fiction submission – is “perfectly clean, without a stray comma; uniform in length, with evenly paced paragraphs and a distinctive tone that is simultaneously breezy and grandiose.” – The Atlantic
- Looking At 100s Of Thousands Of College Essays: AI Flattens Creativity
This seems to be especially true for students. A.I.’s smooth sentences, elegant transitions and rich vocabulary give the illusion of expansive creativity and individuality. But the underlying ideas often converge into a few homogenized categories. – The New York Times
- The Special Kind Of Knowledge That Can’t Be Taught
It’s not the kind of knowledge that you gain from reading a textbook or listening to a lecture, nor is it the kind of knowledge that subjects report when they try to describe their experiences to others. It can’t be expressed in natural language – at least, not fully. – Psyche
- AI Is Homogenizing Our Writing And Our Thinking
Yes, we are standing to sound like LLMs in our writings. This may not be as bad if this was just restricted to how people write. This is now also impacting how people think! – 3 Quarks Daily
