AJ Four Ways: Text Only (by date) | headlines only
DANCE
IDEAS
- AI Gets a Museum; Its Story Cracks
Good Morning,
The AI conversation is colliding with itself today. Refik Anadol’s Dataland — billed as the world’s first AI art museum — got a June opening date inside Frank Gehry’s Grand L.A. complex (Artnet). Meanwhile, a new Google DeepMind paper argues large language models will never be conscious, demonstrating the gap between AI marketing and rigorous science (404 Media). And a dissection of Sora’s stalled adoption asks why creative AI keeps drawing initial crowds and then bleeding them (The Conversation). The shift is from what AI can do to what it can sustain — and who pays for the institutional bets placed before the answer is in.
Elsewhere: Venice’s La Fenice abruptly fired Beatrice Venezi as incoming music director after she trash-talked the opera house and its audience to an Argentine paper (The Guardian). And Chicago arts leaders say openly they no longer count on federal funding as a reliable line item (Crain’s Chicago Business).
A 6th-century New Testament text long thought irretrievable from re-used parchment has been recovered through “ghost imaging” (Artnet). Medieval monks broke the book up. The technology of 2026 put it back together.
All of our stories below.
- “Ghost Imaging” Recovers Text Of 1,500-Year-Old Biblical Manuscript
The 6th-century Codex H included a Greek-language copy of the New Testament’s letters of St. Paul. Sometime in the Middle Ages, though, the monks of Mt. Athos broke the book up and re-used the parchment. Fragments have since been identified, but the original text on them was considered irretrievable — until now. – Artnet
- Rise Of The Viral Micro-Drama
While the rest of the world was getting hooked on cat videos and bedroom-dance routines, Chinese creators were tinkering with something more ambitious: serialized shows shot vertically, for phones, and packed with racy plots, absurd twists, and great swells of emotion. – The New Yorker
- Nilo Cruz: The Art Of Opera Libretto
A play lives in language. An opera lives in duration. One moment in an opera can expand for five minutes. Maybe you give the composer a full sentence. They might take one word and heighten it, expand it even more. Maybe the whole sentence disappears into music. – The Paris Review
- AI: A Philosophy About Language
The underlying intelligence of a large language model isn’t a function of its architecture, its parameter count, or the volume of compute thrown at its training. It is not even about the training data. It is a function of the social complexity of the civilization whose language it digested. – The Ideas Newsletter
ISSUES
- A Detailed Account Of The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Heist
A former FBI agent who led the investigation for more than two decades is now offering the first detailed account of how investigators reached that conclusion — and publicly identifying the men he believes were involved. – AP News
- The World’s First Museum Of AI-Generated Art Is Coming Soon To L.A.
“Dataland, the world’s first A.I. art museum, is set to open on June 20 after more than two-and-a-half-years of planning and construction. … The museum will be housed inside the Grand L.A., a Frank Gehry-designed complex comprised of high-end apartments, entertainment facilities, and a luxury hotel.” – Artnet
- So An AI Has Just Declared A Painting By A Street Artist More Valuable Than A Picasso. Questions Abound
What’s worth more—a Picasso or a painting by a street artist no one has heard of? According to the AI model we built, the answer is the latter. – ARTnews
- The New LACMA: Architectural Drama At The Expense Of Art
Carolina Miranda: “In some ways, this freeway-like building could not be more LA: messy, sprawling, too big to take in from a single vantage point. In others — its embrace of the road and its relentless horizontal-ness — it seems stuck in a vision of the past.” – Bloomberg
- Who Does Trump Want To Hire To Redo The National Mall Reflecting Pool? His Pool Guy
Trump originally envisioned the pool being topped with turquoise so that it would look like the Bahamas, but was convinced by the contractor to choose “American flag blue” instead. – Artnet
MEDIA
- How Chicago’s Arts Institutions Are Coping With Federal Funding Cuts
“The defunding of arts and humanities programming across the state has left leaders skeptical as to whether government funding can be a reliable source in the future.” – Crain’s Chicago Business
- Ireland’s Artist Basic Income May Not Account For Artists With Disabilities
“Ó Ceallacháin says many artists with disabilities feel as though they need to “]exist between ‘professional enough’ to be a ‘real’ artist for the Department of Culture and ‘disabled enough’ to receive support from the Department of Social Protection.” – Irish Times
- The Deep, Inescapable Unease Of The New Michael Jackson Biopic
And ‘unease’ is too kind a way to put it: “Everything left unsaid still lingers between the lines, sandwiched between the formidable melodies of his greatest hits, like toxic ooze leaking out from the middle of two slices of Wonderbread.” – Salon
- News Publishers Are Trying To Prevent AI Scraping, But They’re Killing A Valuable History Service
Talk about the baby and the bathwater: “History needs stewards. The people of the Internet Archive do an outstanding job of preserving irreplaceable work and making it available to journalists and researchers.” – Nieman Lab
- A Binational $1.3 Million Program To Fund Individual Creatives In San Diego And Tijuana
“At its core, Artists Count consists of a $1.3 million fund, available to active artists in both San Diego and Tijuana. In addition, a companion study will focus on communities with the least access to resources, examining ‘the realities, challenges, and economic impact of working artists’ on both sides of the border.” – SanDiegoRed
MUSIC
- “Ghost Imaging” Recovers Text Of 1,500-Year-Old Biblical Manuscript
The 6th-century Codex H included a Greek-language copy of the New Testament’s letters of St. Paul. Sometime in the Middle Ages, though, the monks of Mt. Athos broke the book up and re-used the parchment. Fragments have since been identified, but the original text on them was considered irretrievable — until now. – Artnet
- Docs: Adelaide Writers Week Sacrificed To Save Arts Festival
Adelaide writers’ week was sacrificed to save the 2026 Adelaide festival, an event that ploughs more than $60m into South Australia’s economy each year, documents show. – The Guardian
- How AI Looks Set To Change The Actual Printing Of Books
“A new report from the Book Manufacturers’ Institute on the state of the book industry predicts that printing is on the cusp of potential major changes.” – Publishers Weekly
- Did Shakespeare Bring Down McCarthy?
Or was it Kit Marlowe, getting some long-delayed revenge on conservatives in government? – The Atlantic
- As Anyone With Literary Chops Knows, This Is A Big Deal
Haruki Murakami has a new novel coming out, and the narrator is … what? A woman?! – LitHub
PEOPLE
- AI Gets a Museum; Its Story Cracks
Good Morning,
The AI conversation is colliding with itself today. Refik Anadol’s Dataland — billed as the world’s first AI art museum — got a June opening date inside Frank Gehry’s Grand L.A. complex (Artnet). Meanwhile, a new Google DeepMind paper argues large language models will never be conscious, demonstrating the gap between AI marketing and rigorous science (404 Media). And a dissection of Sora’s stalled adoption asks why creative AI keeps drawing initial crowds and then bleeding them (The Conversation). The shift is from what AI can do to what it can sustain — and who pays for the institutional bets placed before the answer is in.
Elsewhere: Venice’s La Fenice abruptly fired Beatrice Venezi as incoming music director after she trash-talked the opera house and its audience to an Argentine paper (The Guardian). And Chicago arts leaders say openly they no longer count on federal funding as a reliable line item (Crain’s Chicago Business).
A 6th-century New Testament text long thought irretrievable from re-used parchment has been recovered through “ghost imaging” (Artnet). Medieval monks broke the book up. The technology of 2026 put it back together.
All of our stories below.
- “Ghost Imaging” Recovers Text Of 1,500-Year-Old Biblical Manuscript
The 6th-century Codex H included a Greek-language copy of the New Testament’s letters of St. Paul. Sometime in the Middle Ages, though, the monks of Mt. Athos broke the book up and re-used the parchment. Fragments have since been identified, but the original text on them was considered irretrievable — until now. – Artnet
- Rise Of The Viral Micro-Drama
While the rest of the world was getting hooked on cat videos and bedroom-dance routines, Chinese creators were tinkering with something more ambitious: serialized shows shot vertically, for phones, and packed with racy plots, absurd twists, and great swells of emotion. – The New Yorker
- Nilo Cruz: The Art Of Opera Libretto
A play lives in language. An opera lives in duration. One moment in an opera can expand for five minutes. Maybe you give the composer a full sentence. They might take one word and heighten it, expand it even more. Maybe the whole sentence disappears into music. – The Paris Review
- AI: A Philosophy About Language
The underlying intelligence of a large language model isn’t a function of its architecture, its parameter count, or the volume of compute thrown at its training. It is not even about the training data. It is a function of the social complexity of the civilization whose language it digested. – The Ideas Newsletter
PEOPLE
- AI Gets a Museum; Its Story Cracks
Good Morning,
The AI conversation is colliding with itself today. Refik Anadol’s Dataland — billed as the world’s first AI art museum — got a June opening date inside Frank Gehry’s Grand L.A. complex (Artnet). Meanwhile, a new Google DeepMind paper argues large language models will never be conscious, demonstrating the gap between AI marketing and rigorous science (404 Media). And a dissection of Sora’s stalled adoption asks why creative AI keeps drawing initial crowds and then bleeding them (The Conversation). The shift is from what AI can do to what it can sustain — and who pays for the institutional bets placed before the answer is in.
Elsewhere: Venice’s La Fenice abruptly fired Beatrice Venezi as incoming music director after she trash-talked the opera house and its audience to an Argentine paper (The Guardian). And Chicago arts leaders say openly they no longer count on federal funding as a reliable line item (Crain’s Chicago Business).
A 6th-century New Testament text long thought irretrievable from re-used parchment has been recovered through “ghost imaging” (Artnet). Medieval monks broke the book up. The technology of 2026 put it back together.
All of our stories below.
- “Ghost Imaging” Recovers Text Of 1,500-Year-Old Biblical Manuscript
The 6th-century Codex H included a Greek-language copy of the New Testament’s letters of St. Paul. Sometime in the Middle Ages, though, the monks of Mt. Athos broke the book up and re-used the parchment. Fragments have since been identified, but the original text on them was considered irretrievable — until now. – Artnet
- Rise Of The Viral Micro-Drama
While the rest of the world was getting hooked on cat videos and bedroom-dance routines, Chinese creators were tinkering with something more ambitious: serialized shows shot vertically, for phones, and packed with racy plots, absurd twists, and great swells of emotion. – The New Yorker
- Nilo Cruz: The Art Of Opera Libretto
A play lives in language. An opera lives in duration. One moment in an opera can expand for five minutes. Maybe you give the composer a full sentence. They might take one word and heighten it, expand it even more. Maybe the whole sentence disappears into music. – The Paris Review
- AI: A Philosophy About Language
The underlying intelligence of a large language model isn’t a function of its architecture, its parameter count, or the volume of compute thrown at its training. It is not even about the training data. It is a function of the social complexity of the civilization whose language it digested. – The Ideas Newsletter
THEATRE
VISUAL
- AI: A Philosophy About Language
The underlying intelligence of a large language model isn’t a function of its architecture, its parameter count, or the volume of compute thrown at its training. It is not even about the training data. It is a function of the social complexity of the civilization whose language it digested. – The Ideas Newsletter
- New Google Paper Argues AI Will Never Be Conscious
The paper shows the divergence between the self-serving narratives AI companies promote in the media and how they collapse under rigorous examination. – 404 Media
- Why AI Is Struggling With Creativity
Many generative AI programs geared toward creative fields have encountered a common problem: rapid initial adoption, followed by declining sustained engagement. – The Conversation
- Why It’s So Difficult To Agree On Truth
These different notions of truth shape everyday discourse as well as philosophical debate. They might help explain why some arguments feel pointless, why political debates circle endlessly, and why certain disagreements never quite meet on common ground. – Psyche
- How Short-Form Video Clips Took Over The Internet
Once you start looking, you realize that short video clips—not tweets, or posts, or static photos—have become the atomic unit of online content. Short-form video, of course, isn’t new, but the prevalence of the clips is. – The Atlantic
