AJ Four Ways: Text Only (by date) | headlines only
DANCE
IDEAS
- Anti-Trans Political Rhetoric Is Harming Nonbinary And Trans Actors Too
Even actors like Elliot Page and Asia Kate Dillon have said it’s harder to find work in a world where roles for them are, according to them, vanishing. – CBC
- The Site Where Modern British Ballet Was Born
The Georgian style Festival Theatre – now the Cambridge Buddhist Centre – had recently undergone some intense architectural changes when its owner invited future Royal Ballet founder Ninette de Valois to choreograph there. – BBC (Yahoo)
- How A Quick-Thinking Photographer Turned A Traffic Jam Into An Instantly Iconic Image
“As we’re all waiting for traffic to clear, I could feel the motion of the bridge, slightly pulsating up and down. Curiosity got to many people, who got out of their cars to see if they could see anything.” – San Francisco Chronicle
- Serial Fiction Is Having A Moment. Again.
“’Today’s newspapers have fallen out of the habit of rewarding their readers with chunks of fiction. … So it has fallen to us to pick up the slack.’ But it seems worth asking why ‘chunks’ of fiction are their own reward.” – LitHub
- Ireland Has Become One Of Hollywood’s Go-To Global Production Hotspots
“Ireland increasingly has become a destination for American movies, television series and the once-quintessentially L.A. creation: the game show.” – Los Angeles Times
ISSUES
- How A Quick-Thinking Photographer Turned A Traffic Jam Into An Instantly Iconic Image
“As we’re all waiting for traffic to clear, I could feel the motion of the bridge, slightly pulsating up and down. Curiosity got to many people, who got out of their cars to see if they could see anything.” – San Francisco Chronicle
- For A Few Hundred Euros, You Can Get A Rembrandt Inked On Your Body
“It’s a highbrow-meets-lowbrow thing,” said the Dutch tattoo artist completing the requests. He’s done it before, but “this time, [he] had a greater ambition: to reproduce one of Rembrandt’s most famous etchings, The Descent From the Cross, from 1633, across a man’s back.” – The New York Times
- This Oregon Museum Had To Sell Its Museum
And Tuesday’s election will determine what happens with its collection – and if its local advocates have done enough to organize support. – Oregon ArtsWatch
- The Rise And Fall Of The Triumphal Arch
“In 1941, Albert Speer presented plans to his Führer for a monumental arch that would tower nearly 400 feet over Berlin. Taller than the towers of the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge in New York, it would have been twice the height of the Arc de Triomphe.” – The New York Times
- The La Brea Tar Pits Renovation Requires Packing, Moving, And Unpacking 3.5 Million Fossils
“Buried in the bones are clues about how plants and animals lived and died. Understanding why some of those species became extinct could help us.” – The New York Times
MEDIA
- Anti-Trans Political Rhetoric Is Harming Nonbinary And Trans Actors Too
Even actors like Elliot Page and Asia Kate Dillon have said it’s harder to find work in a world where roles for them are, according to them, vanishing. – CBC
- AI Isn’t Just Cooking Our Water Supply And Our Writing, But Also Our Food
“Most of those bowls and sandwiches available in the lunchtime hours are sold by fast-casual chains, the kind of establishments that give private equity investors wet dreams thanks to their sky-high margins, low labor costs, and simplistic, trend-driven menus.” – Ravenous
- Solidarity Mural In Iowa, Covered By Blue Tarp In Advance Of Trump Visit, Ordered By The City To Be Uncovered
A spokesperson from the building’s management company: “The goal of the White House in covering the mural was to provide exterior branding and put up a U.S. flag.” But the city had not authorized any exterior modifications. – Des Moines Register (MSN)
- You Don’t Know What The Algorithms Are Doing To Us Until You Walk Away
“Here’s the thing about spending a month off grid and overseas: … You are more relaxed than you have ever been, and you have forgotten the way nearly every news story of the past decade grabs hold of your heart and squeezes, twists, strangles. That constant, low-level dread.” – Slate
- As AI Infiltrates Scholarly Writing, The Value Of A Journal Article Is Collapsing
“Unfortunately, the scholars submitting papers aren’t the only ones using AI. So are many of their peer reviewers. One recent peer review that my journal received—from a senior scholar—read like an unedited cut-and-paste job from an LLM.” – The Atlantic
MUSIC
- Serial Fiction Is Having A Moment. Again.
“’Today’s newspapers have fallen out of the habit of rewarding their readers with chunks of fiction. … So it has fallen to us to pick up the slack.’ But it seems worth asking why ‘chunks’ of fiction are their own reward.” – LitHub
- The Dark Underbelly Exposed When One Author Wrote Back To His AI Spammers
The scammer “gave me a physical address. Neither of us commented on how unusual it was for the founder of the Berlin Book Club to have a postal address in the Philippines.” – The Guardian (UK)
- How To Write Fictional AI In An Age Of Tech Bros
“Silicon Valley has become adept at repurposing science fiction as building blocks of its fantastical hype machine. When authors try to imagine a future in which machines have thoughts and feelings, their work instantly seems to get woven into a tapestry of bullshit.” – Happy Dancing
- The Queen Of Fairy Smut, With A New Book And Loads Of Merch, Rises Again
“Maas hysteria gripped the Bell House in the hours before the book dropped. Fans traded conspiracy theories about future plot twists, got temporary tattoos and face paint, drank themed cocktails, posed for photos behind a giant cauldron and bought branded candles, bag charms and other memorabilia.” – The New York Times
- This Is How Users Are Dealing With AO3 Going Down
It’s … intense. “Fans are compiling Google Docs of links to downloaded stories, touting them as ‘survival guides’ for the ‘AO3 apocalypse’ and organizing them by fictional character pairings, or ships.” – Wired
PEOPLE
- Anti-Trans Political Rhetoric Is Harming Nonbinary And Trans Actors Too
Even actors like Elliot Page and Asia Kate Dillon have said it’s harder to find work in a world where roles for them are, according to them, vanishing. – CBC
- The Site Where Modern British Ballet Was Born
The Georgian style Festival Theatre – now the Cambridge Buddhist Centre – had recently undergone some intense architectural changes when its owner invited future Royal Ballet founder Ninette de Valois to choreograph there. – BBC (Yahoo)
- How A Quick-Thinking Photographer Turned A Traffic Jam Into An Instantly Iconic Image
“As we’re all waiting for traffic to clear, I could feel the motion of the bridge, slightly pulsating up and down. Curiosity got to many people, who got out of their cars to see if they could see anything.” – San Francisco Chronicle
- Serial Fiction Is Having A Moment. Again.
“’Today’s newspapers have fallen out of the habit of rewarding their readers with chunks of fiction. … So it has fallen to us to pick up the slack.’ But it seems worth asking why ‘chunks’ of fiction are their own reward.” – LitHub
- Ireland Has Become One Of Hollywood’s Go-To Global Production Hotspots
“Ireland increasingly has become a destination for American movies, television series and the once-quintessentially L.A. creation: the game show.” – Los Angeles Times
PEOPLE
- Anti-Trans Political Rhetoric Is Harming Nonbinary And Trans Actors Too
Even actors like Elliot Page and Asia Kate Dillon have said it’s harder to find work in a world where roles for them are, according to them, vanishing. – CBC
- The Site Where Modern British Ballet Was Born
The Georgian style Festival Theatre – now the Cambridge Buddhist Centre – had recently undergone some intense architectural changes when its owner invited future Royal Ballet founder Ninette de Valois to choreograph there. – BBC (Yahoo)
- How A Quick-Thinking Photographer Turned A Traffic Jam Into An Instantly Iconic Image
“As we’re all waiting for traffic to clear, I could feel the motion of the bridge, slightly pulsating up and down. Curiosity got to many people, who got out of their cars to see if they could see anything.” – San Francisco Chronicle
- Serial Fiction Is Having A Moment. Again.
“’Today’s newspapers have fallen out of the habit of rewarding their readers with chunks of fiction. … So it has fallen to us to pick up the slack.’ But it seems worth asking why ‘chunks’ of fiction are their own reward.” – LitHub
- Ireland Has Become One Of Hollywood’s Go-To Global Production Hotspots
“Ireland increasingly has become a destination for American movies, television series and the once-quintessentially L.A. creation: the game show.” – Los Angeles Times
THEATRE
VISUAL
- Predictive Algorithms Are Flattening Culture Everywhere In The World
“At ‘temperature zero,’ the [large language] model always chooses the most likely next token and gives the same answer every time” – down to the music and menus in every restaurant or pub. – The New York Times
- Why We Like To Be Scared
“Because of horror’s position as a sandbox for misfortune, consumers tend to reward horror films that reflect their generation’s anxieties.” – Time
- Major Culture Shift: Private Equity Is Buying Up Small Businesses
Deal by deal, ownership is being extracted from the thousands of communities where businesses were built to the handful of cities where capital is already concentrated. – The New York Times
- How Our Brains Cope With Uncertainty
Systems fail; unanticipated difficulties occur; things break or rot. To cope with this reality, philosophical and religious traditions such as Buddhism and Stoicism have long focused on transience, unpredictability, and the inevitability of change and loss. – Scientific American
- Don’t Forget: Technology That Serves Creativity
We live in a golden age of digital creativity. Forget A.I.: you, yourself, can record an album from your sofa, or curate a photo-essay on the train. In that spirit, here are some of my favorite creative digital tools. – The New Yorker