AJ Four Ways: Text Only (by date) | headlines only
DANCE
IDEAS
- 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
- Cancellation as a growth strategy
Good Morning,
Of course the top story is that a federal judge has ordered the removal of Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center. AND that the administration stop plans to close the center for two years. But whether the order sticks or not, the Kennedy Center has already been severely damaged. (Washington Post)
Two numbers tell today’s Hollywood story. Top executive pay at the major studios jumped an astonishing 51 percent last year — to $615 million — even as the industry shed 17,000 jobs (The Wrap). And then there’s CBS, which will turn a $40 million annual loss into a $55 million profit not by producing better late-night programming but by handing Stephen Colbert’s former slot to comedian Byron Allen and walking away (Variety). And who cares about the ratings? They no longer have anything to do with the bottom line. Contraction is the business model now.
The pressure from above isn’t easing either. ABC’s local stations called the FCC’s early license review “unlawful, arbitrary and unconstitutional”; Disney followed with a filing arguing the move violates the First Amendment (AP, Wall Street Journal). In the UK, Arts Council England rolled back its “Let’s Create” inclusivity push in favor of a return to “excellence.” The DEI era is truly gone. (The Stage).
We learn more about how AI is changing creative input: a study of hundreds of thousands of college essays finds the prose gets smoother but the underlying ideas collapse into a handful of templates (New York Times). Publishers, meanwhile, are bracing for nonfiction to follow fiction into the AI flood (New York Magazine).
And a reveal about the man who built a career on stage-fright silence: newly surfaced audio of Harpo Marx actually speaking (The Guardian).
All of our stories below.
Doug
- OMG, Audio Of Harpo Marx Actually Speaking!
Harpo (né Arthur) developed his silent persona due to his own stage fright; in later years he said he didn’t want to “tear down a character it took me decades to build.” On rare occasions, though, he did speak in public, though not when microphones were around — except for this one time. – The Guardian
- Top Hollywood Exec Pay Rose 51 Percent As Industry Shed 17,000 Jobs
The total compensation for the top executives surged a stunning 51% from a year earlier, based on a tally of $615 million vs. $408.5 million in 2024. – The Wrap
- ESPN Meets The Savannah Bananas’ Choreographer
“Maceo Harrison deftly designs routines that emphasize charisma over technical precision and spotlight the teams’ natural showmen while camouflaging the players with two left feet. … Sometimes he has mere hours to choreograph and just as little time to teach his routines to the players.” – ESPN
ISSUES
- 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
- How We Selected Our “100 Best Artworks About America”
“We started working on this list over a year ago and spent more than a month alone wrestling with how best to define its purview. We decided this would not be a list of the best American artworks, which is both too challenging an exercise and too wide a net to cast.” – ARTnews
- How Have The Great Pyramids Survived Millennia Of Earthquakes? By Design, Of Course
“The Great Pyramid behaves as a single, cohesive unit that naturally vibrates at a fundamental frequency of approximately 2.3 Hz. The frequency difference prevents the destructive phenomenon of resonance, the primary culprit behind the collapse of modern buildings, when a structure’s frequency matches the earthquakes vibrations.” – Artnet
MEDIA
- 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
- Smithsonian Chief Lonnie Bunch Has Curated A New Exhibit About America’s Ideals. He Thinks It May Be His Last Show.
“(He) did not set out to make the exhibit American Aspirations his swan song. But he said that his organizing of an exhibition that honors America’s 250th anniversary could well be among his final acts as secretary. ‘It’s probably the last exhibit I will curate, there’s no doubt about that.’” – The New York Times
- England’s Arts Funding Body Changes Its Criteria To Re-Focus On “Excellence”
Arts Council England has unveiled a new strategy to replace the “Let’s Create” regime, which was widely criticized for appearing to de-emphasize high quality in favor of inclusiveness. The new policy aims for ACE’s grants to “support excellence, deliver for everybody, and reach everywhere.” – The Stage (UK)
- NYC Culture As Basic City Infrastructure
Right now, culture represents just 0.21% of the city’s budget, below its long-term average. Recent investments have been meaningful, including $75 million in last year’s budget. But $30 million of that funding remains for one-time support. That is not how essential infrastructure should be funded. – Hyperallergic
MUSIC
- 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
- Spotify Has Become A Huge Player In Audiobooks
Spotify announced that the total number of hours of audiobooks listened to on the service are up 60% year-over-year, with one million people having paid for Audiobooks+, an add-on launched last year that allows listeners to unlock additional hours of audiobooks on top of those already included with its premium service. – Publishers Weekly
- Libraries Plead With Big Five Publishers To Rethink E-Book Pricing
“Five public library organizations from the U.S. and Canada … (are urging) publishers to negotiate usage-based e-book lending models as well as perpetual-use options.” The director of one of the organizations warned that e-book costs have “become unsustainable, and for many small libraries, impossible.” – Publishers Weekly
- Knoxville Reverses Its Ban Of Alex Haley’s “Roots” From School Libraries
“Knox County Schools Superintendent Jon Rysewyk said the district will return the (Pulitzer-winning) 1976 novel to school library shelves, walking back a decision that (led to) … weeks of community backlash, board member pressure, and statewide criticism.” – Tennessee Lookout
PEOPLE
- 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
- Cancellation as a growth strategy
Good Morning,
Of course the top story is that a federal judge has ordered the removal of Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center. AND that the administration stop plans to close the center for two years. But whether the order sticks or not, the Kennedy Center has already been severely damaged. (Washington Post)
Two numbers tell today’s Hollywood story. Top executive pay at the major studios jumped an astonishing 51 percent last year — to $615 million — even as the industry shed 17,000 jobs (The Wrap). And then there’s CBS, which will turn a $40 million annual loss into a $55 million profit not by producing better late-night programming but by handing Stephen Colbert’s former slot to comedian Byron Allen and walking away (Variety). And who cares about the ratings? They no longer have anything to do with the bottom line. Contraction is the business model now.
The pressure from above isn’t easing either. ABC’s local stations called the FCC’s early license review “unlawful, arbitrary and unconstitutional”; Disney followed with a filing arguing the move violates the First Amendment (AP, Wall Street Journal). In the UK, Arts Council England rolled back its “Let’s Create” inclusivity push in favor of a return to “excellence.” The DEI era is truly gone. (The Stage).
We learn more about how AI is changing creative input: a study of hundreds of thousands of college essays finds the prose gets smoother but the underlying ideas collapse into a handful of templates (New York Times). Publishers, meanwhile, are bracing for nonfiction to follow fiction into the AI flood (New York Magazine).
And a reveal about the man who built a career on stage-fright silence: newly surfaced audio of Harpo Marx actually speaking (The Guardian).
All of our stories below.
Doug
- OMG, Audio Of Harpo Marx Actually Speaking!
Harpo (né Arthur) developed his silent persona due to his own stage fright; in later years he said he didn’t want to “tear down a character it took me decades to build.” On rare occasions, though, he did speak in public, though not when microphones were around — except for this one time. – The Guardian
- Top Hollywood Exec Pay Rose 51 Percent As Industry Shed 17,000 Jobs
The total compensation for the top executives surged a stunning 51% from a year earlier, based on a tally of $615 million vs. $408.5 million in 2024. – The Wrap
- ESPN Meets The Savannah Bananas’ Choreographer
“Maceo Harrison deftly designs routines that emphasize charisma over technical precision and spotlight the teams’ natural showmen while camouflaging the players with two left feet. … Sometimes he has mere hours to choreograph and just as little time to teach his routines to the players.” – ESPN
PEOPLE
- 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
- Cancellation as a growth strategy
Good Morning,
Of course the top story is that a federal judge has ordered the removal of Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center. AND that the administration stop plans to close the center for two years. But whether the order sticks or not, the Kennedy Center has already been severely damaged. (Washington Post)
Two numbers tell today’s Hollywood story. Top executive pay at the major studios jumped an astonishing 51 percent last year — to $615 million — even as the industry shed 17,000 jobs (The Wrap). And then there’s CBS, which will turn a $40 million annual loss into a $55 million profit not by producing better late-night programming but by handing Stephen Colbert’s former slot to comedian Byron Allen and walking away (Variety). And who cares about the ratings? They no longer have anything to do with the bottom line. Contraction is the business model now.
The pressure from above isn’t easing either. ABC’s local stations called the FCC’s early license review “unlawful, arbitrary and unconstitutional”; Disney followed with a filing arguing the move violates the First Amendment (AP, Wall Street Journal). In the UK, Arts Council England rolled back its “Let’s Create” inclusivity push in favor of a return to “excellence.” The DEI era is truly gone. (The Stage).
We learn more about how AI is changing creative input: a study of hundreds of thousands of college essays finds the prose gets smoother but the underlying ideas collapse into a handful of templates (New York Times). Publishers, meanwhile, are bracing for nonfiction to follow fiction into the AI flood (New York Magazine).
And a reveal about the man who built a career on stage-fright silence: newly surfaced audio of Harpo Marx actually speaking (The Guardian).
All of our stories below.
Doug
- OMG, Audio Of Harpo Marx Actually Speaking!
Harpo (né Arthur) developed his silent persona due to his own stage fright; in later years he said he didn’t want to “tear down a character it took me decades to build.” On rare occasions, though, he did speak in public, though not when microphones were around — except for this one time. – The Guardian
- Top Hollywood Exec Pay Rose 51 Percent As Industry Shed 17,000 Jobs
The total compensation for the top executives surged a stunning 51% from a year earlier, based on a tally of $615 million vs. $408.5 million in 2024. – The Wrap
- ESPN Meets The Savannah Bananas’ Choreographer
“Maceo Harrison deftly designs routines that emphasize charisma over technical precision and spotlight the teams’ natural showmen while camouflaging the players with two left feet. … Sometimes he has mere hours to choreograph and just as little time to teach his routines to the players.” – ESPN
THEATRE
VISUAL
- 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
- Eyewitness Memory Is Unreliable. Or Is It?
The science of memory has been shifting. A re-evaluation of real-world criminal cases and laboratory experiments suggests that an eyewitness’s confidence in a specific memory can be a strong indicator of the veracity of their account, at least in certain circumstances. – Nature
- You Couldn’t Design A More Anti-News Internet If You Tried
It’s like an invisible tax levied on our communities that we pay civically, cognitively and sometimes even literally, in the form of higher local bond prices due to more wasteful government spending. Increasingly, this invisible tax is being silently levied by Big Tech. – NiemanLab
