AJ Four Ways: Text Only (by date) | headlines only
DANCE
IDEAS
- How Do You Get Good Anymore?
Good Morning,
Classical music training still runs on a guru model — teacher as oracle, student as supplicant — and an argument in The New York Times says the deference is damaging the people it’s meant to turn into musicians. The useful question isn’t who behaved badly, it’s what should mastering your craft actually require you to hand over.
One field over, the question is getting harder to answer. Young writers are finding that the small, unglamorous, paid assignments where you used to learn the craft are being absorbed by machines before anyone earns a first byline (Fast Company). The training ground was always the low end of the market. That’s the part being automated first.
At the other end of mastery, Boston Symphony musicians have voted to authorize the first potential strike in the orchestra’s history (WGBH).
Audiences, meanwhile, keep choosing to go physical. Young buyers are pushing CD players back into stores (The Guardian), and country has taken over the Billboard charts largely by being the genre people still buy deliberately rather than absorb passively (Slate).
Elsewhere, the LAPD is investigating a Nicolas Cage movie that went missing at Netflix (MSN). Someone mislaid an entire film.
The rest of our stories below.
- The Struggles To Translate Final Fantasy, The World’s Biggest Entertainment, Between Cultures
“For Final Fantasy XVI, Fox and his team were given unusual latitude. The writers wanted the story to feel true to Western medieval fantasy stories.” – Washington Post (Yahoo)
- How Winnie Became The Pooh Bear, A Century Ago
“Sometimes words need pictures and pictures need words. When they find each other, characters spring to life.” – NPR
- Writing Is Hard, And Young Writers Are Getting Extra Discouraged
“They’re simultaneously struggling to figure out if they need to use AI to keep up in today’s competitive industry—or eschew it altogether in order to maintain trust.” – Fast Company
- Now The LAPD Are Involved In Finding Out What Happened To Netflix’s Nicolas Cage Movie
“This report is being made on an emergency basis, as there is reason to believe that Netflix, Inc. and its employees are suppressing and/or spoliating evidence of the theft of an asset with a cost of $45 million to create.” – Los Angeles Times (MSN)
ISSUES
- Designer Error, By About 10,000 Miles
Sydney, Australia, has an Allianz soccer stadium, and so does Munich, Germany. Guess which one appears on the Sydney Marathon medal? – The Guardian (UK)
- The Smithsonian Plan For A Latinx Museum Avoids A Congressional Vote
“The Smithsonian Institution has called a board meeting to discuss giving one of its current buildings to the National Museum of the American Latino, which would bypass the need for congressional approval for a new site.” – The New York Times
- Behold America’s First-Ever Jellyfish Museum
“The private Jellyfish Museum in Pompano Beach, Florida, just north of Fort Lauderdale, … was created by Alex and Yana Yanovsky, who previously developed successful aquariums in Ukraine, including their first jellyfish museum in Kyiv. The couple left those facilities behind when they fled Ukraine following the 2022 Russian invasion.” – AP
- The Growing Threat Of Cyberattacks On Museums
We live in a time when digital systems underpin everything from ticketing to surveillance and building access. Sidelining cybersecurity leaves museums vulnerable to attacks that could threaten both their finances and their collections. – The Conversation
- Institute Of Contemporary Art San Diego Lays Off Nearly Half Its Employees
The ICA San Diego (not to be confused with the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego) is reducing its staff from 19 to 11, including almost all senior management and public-facing workers. The head curator position was eliminated last month. – The San Diego Union-Tribune
MEDIA
- The Mayor Of Los Angeles Suddenly Loves The Warnermount Merger
What in the rolling over for rich people hell, Karen Bass? – Vulture
- Weird Idea Spreads On Chinese Internet That Tang Dynasty Never Existed
The Tang era (618-907 CE) is considered a golden age, a period of territorial expansion, prosperity and high culture which every Chinese schoolchild learns about. Claiming it never happened is like telling Brits there was no Norman Conquest. Yet the bogus idea has caught on widely enough that China’s government is weighing in. – CNN
- How The COVID Crisis Shifted Culture Funding
In 2019, arts organizations in BIPOC-majority neighborhoods of a major U.S. city received 16% less median grant funding than those in white-majority neighborhoods. By 2022, they were receiving 289% more. – SMU Cultural Data
- How The Kennedy Center Plans To Put Trump’s Name Back
- Refurbishment Plans For The Kennedy Center Detailed
More than 160 pages of plans, assembled by the real estate company JLL and presented to the board of trustees, outline extensive changes throughout the building. – Washington Post
MUSIC
- How Winnie Became The Pooh Bear, A Century Ago
“Sometimes words need pictures and pictures need words. When they find each other, characters spring to life.” – NPR
- Writing Is Hard, And Young Writers Are Getting Extra Discouraged
“They’re simultaneously struggling to figure out if they need to use AI to keep up in today’s competitive industry—or eschew it altogether in order to maintain trust.” – Fast Company
- Orchids Made Charles Darwin Who He Was
“Darwin had long been interested in orchids, possibly influenced by the borderline sexual love his grandfather, Erasmus, felt for them and put into his writings.” – LitHub
- More Schools Are Teaching Cursive Again. Should They Be?
Pennsylvania and Florida legislators argue, for example, that an informed citizenry needs to be able to read historical documents, which are often written in cursive script. – Washington Post
- Texas Is Coming After The “Filthy, Dirty” Books In School Libraries, Says Lt. Gov.
“Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, during a Wednesday press conference, threatened to take over public school districts that don’t remove ‘obscene books’ from their library shelves.” – San Antonio Current
PEOPLE
- How Do You Get Good Anymore?
Good Morning,
Classical music training still runs on a guru model — teacher as oracle, student as supplicant — and an argument in The New York Times says the deference is damaging the people it’s meant to turn into musicians. The useful question isn’t who behaved badly, it’s what should mastering your craft actually require you to hand over.
One field over, the question is getting harder to answer. Young writers are finding that the small, unglamorous, paid assignments where you used to learn the craft are being absorbed by machines before anyone earns a first byline (Fast Company). The training ground was always the low end of the market. That’s the part being automated first.
At the other end of mastery, Boston Symphony musicians have voted to authorize the first potential strike in the orchestra’s history (WGBH).
Audiences, meanwhile, keep choosing to go physical. Young buyers are pushing CD players back into stores (The Guardian), and country has taken over the Billboard charts largely by being the genre people still buy deliberately rather than absorb passively (Slate).
Elsewhere, the LAPD is investigating a Nicolas Cage movie that went missing at Netflix (MSN). Someone mislaid an entire film.
The rest of our stories below.
- The Struggles To Translate Final Fantasy, The World’s Biggest Entertainment, Between Cultures
“For Final Fantasy XVI, Fox and his team were given unusual latitude. The writers wanted the story to feel true to Western medieval fantasy stories.” – Washington Post (Yahoo)
- How Winnie Became The Pooh Bear, A Century Ago
“Sometimes words need pictures and pictures need words. When they find each other, characters spring to life.” – NPR
- Writing Is Hard, And Young Writers Are Getting Extra Discouraged
“They’re simultaneously struggling to figure out if they need to use AI to keep up in today’s competitive industry—or eschew it altogether in order to maintain trust.” – Fast Company
- Now The LAPD Are Involved In Finding Out What Happened To Netflix’s Nicolas Cage Movie
“This report is being made on an emergency basis, as there is reason to believe that Netflix, Inc. and its employees are suppressing and/or spoliating evidence of the theft of an asset with a cost of $45 million to create.” – Los Angeles Times (MSN)
PEOPLE
- How Do You Get Good Anymore?
Good Morning,
Classical music training still runs on a guru model — teacher as oracle, student as supplicant — and an argument in The New York Times says the deference is damaging the people it’s meant to turn into musicians. The useful question isn’t who behaved badly, it’s what should mastering your craft actually require you to hand over.
One field over, the question is getting harder to answer. Young writers are finding that the small, unglamorous, paid assignments where you used to learn the craft are being absorbed by machines before anyone earns a first byline (Fast Company). The training ground was always the low end of the market. That’s the part being automated first.
At the other end of mastery, Boston Symphony musicians have voted to authorize the first potential strike in the orchestra’s history (WGBH).
Audiences, meanwhile, keep choosing to go physical. Young buyers are pushing CD players back into stores (The Guardian), and country has taken over the Billboard charts largely by being the genre people still buy deliberately rather than absorb passively (Slate).
Elsewhere, the LAPD is investigating a Nicolas Cage movie that went missing at Netflix (MSN). Someone mislaid an entire film.
The rest of our stories below.
- The Struggles To Translate Final Fantasy, The World’s Biggest Entertainment, Between Cultures
“For Final Fantasy XVI, Fox and his team were given unusual latitude. The writers wanted the story to feel true to Western medieval fantasy stories.” – Washington Post (Yahoo)
- How Winnie Became The Pooh Bear, A Century Ago
“Sometimes words need pictures and pictures need words. When they find each other, characters spring to life.” – NPR
- Writing Is Hard, And Young Writers Are Getting Extra Discouraged
“They’re simultaneously struggling to figure out if they need to use AI to keep up in today’s competitive industry—or eschew it altogether in order to maintain trust.” – Fast Company
- Now The LAPD Are Involved In Finding Out What Happened To Netflix’s Nicolas Cage Movie
“This report is being made on an emergency basis, as there is reason to believe that Netflix, Inc. and its employees are suppressing and/or spoliating evidence of the theft of an asset with a cost of $45 million to create.” – Los Angeles Times (MSN)
THEATRE
VISUAL
- Study: More Than One-Third Of Web Pages Created Since 2022 Show Signs Of AI
Over one-third of web pages published after the release of ChatGPT show signs of being written by AI, according to a new study from Pew Research released on Thursday. – TechCrunch
- Research: Large AI Datasets Obscure Authorship
It feels counterintuitive, but at sufficiently large scales, they find, you can often remove any single image from the training data, or every image by a given artist, or every photograph of a given person, and the generated sample doesn’t change. – MIT
- The Fan Psychology
The fan at heart is a manager of excess: too much feeling, too much weight on too little incident. This is a kind of madness after all, the madness of meaning-making under a few too many constraints. – N plus 1
- Research: Majority Of Americans Are Anxious About AI
Today, 52% of Americans say they are more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life – up from 37% in 2021. Another 9% are more excited than concerned and 37% say they’re equally excited and concerned, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted June 22-28, 2026. – Pew Research
- Some Of The Sharpest Political Writers In 18th-Century Britain Were Fictional
British writers in the 18th century repeatedly invented fictional characters to intervene in the politics and culture of their day. – The Conversation