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- Summer Movie Box Office Is On The Verge Of An All-Time Record
Currently, per Rentrak, the North American box office for the first Friday in May through EOD today stands at $4.598 billion, officially the second-highest summer ever behind 2013. If this summer is going to beat 2013’s all-time high, it has $158M to gross. – Deadline
- What I Learned From China’s Robot Games
For the first hour or so, I found the Robot Games enthralling. What can robots already do, and where do they still fall short? Which robot will manage to crawl under an obstacle, and which will pitifully get stuck? But after a while, I suddenly realized that I had grown deeply bored. – Yascha Mounk
- Why Would We Fear AI Music?
It would be an understatement to say that the growing prominence of A.I. music is generating backlash—sometimes it seems this music generates nothing but backlash. – The New Yorker
- What Happens When American Universities Try To Shrink Their Way To Profitability
What’s happening to the New School is an increasingly common story across all of higher education, hit by a perfect storm of financial and political pressures. Well-paid bosses, touting fiscal crises, seek to fire their way to profitability. – Dissent
- Myles & Waldman Stalwart Performance Poets Together Again<a href="https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/2026/08/myles-waldman-stalwart-performance-poets-together-again.html" title="Myles & Waldman
Stalwart Performance Poets Together Again“ - What Do We Want From Reviews? Judgment.
An effective review offers what the concert can’t: an extra-human perspective. By “extra-human,” I mean going beyond the experience of any one person, beyond the perspective of the reviewer and beyond the specific concert itself. – San Francisco Classical Voice
- Meet Curtis’ Youngest New Student. She’s Seven
This year Curtis will have 13 musicians entering school under the age of 18. But even at a place known for prodigies, Olivia is unusual. She is believed to be the youngest student to study at Curtis since 1950, when 6-year-old violinist Diana Halprin matriculated. – Philadelphia Inquirer (MSN)
- “Six” To Close On Broadway After Five-Year Run
Attendance and grosses have fallen from the show’s early highs, with the show playing to 50- to 60-percent capacity this spring, but the production has seen a relatively long, healthy run on Broadway, as the 40th longest running show in its history. – The Hollywood Reporter
- The Fake Experts That AI Keeps Citing
The authors don’t actually exist, but are instead names that large language models repeatedly produce when tasked with generating experts in certain fields. – 404 Media
- Palestinian Artist Sliman Mansour, 79
In works that were by turns personal and political — vividly realistic and unsettlingly surreal — he captured and uplifted Palestinian life and history, creating art that served as a form of preservation as well as resistance. – Washington Post
- Report: Women In UK Arts Say Discrimination Is Rampant
Nearly all (95%) women working in the arts thought gender inequality persisted, while three-quarters (75%) reported experiencing unconscious bias or sexism, according to a survey of 76 arts professionals. – The Guardian
- Another Study Of Violinists Sheds More Doubt On The 10,000-Hours-Of-Practice Idea
“The ‘10,000-hour rule’ is one of the most repeated ideas in popular writing about skill and success: put in 10,000 hours of practice, the story goes, and elite performance follows. … A 2019 study … redid the underlying comparison and found practice hours didn’t cleanly separate the best violinists from merely good ones.” – Science Blog
- Met Museum Calls Off John Galliano Costume Institute Show
“The Metropolitan Museum of Art is canceling its planned exhibit honoring British designer John Galliano, which had led to severe backlash in the Jewish community and beyond because of the designer’s past antisemitic and racist statements.” – AP
- Miss Piggy Is An Icon Of Feminism And Our Last Fabulous Movie Star
“She is part of a lineage that has gone dormant: larger-than-life, carefully curated personas bolstered by their market value at the box office and by how their sheer artistry shapes the texts that end up on the silver screen. These are women like Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, and Mae West.” – Vulture (MSN)
- How An Aging Actor With Dementia Does Samuel Beckett
One might argue that Beckett is the perfect playwright for an actor with that condition to perform — especially when the play is Krapp’s Last Tape, which Peter Marinker is preparing to do this week. Here’s how he, along with the director and crew at London’s Cockpit Theatre, are making it work. – BBC (MSN)
- What — Or Who — Persuades You To Buy That Particular Book?
“The reality is that our reading choices are directed and massaged at every turn. … And who are the persuaders? They’re the booksellers, the supermarket stock buyers, the publishing houses and their ranks of marketers and publicists. And, more recently, persuasion often comes from (social media). How is all this changing publishing?” – The Guardian
- Tiit Helimets Takes The Reins At Sacramento Ballet
The 49-year-old native of Estonia danced with San Francisco Ballet for 18 years, retiring as a principal in 2023. He spent over a decade applying for artistic director positions; now that he has one, he’s excited about almost every aspect of it, even the fundraising. – Pointe Magazine
- Lindsay Clancy Admits She Strangled Her Children. Social Media Sleuths Won’t Stop Accusing Her Ex-Husband.
The only issue at the former obstetric nurse’s trial is whether she deliberately planned the killings (as prosecutors argue) or (as she claims) was in the grip of postpartum psychosis. Yet there’s a crop of true-crime fans on TikTok and other platforms who insist that Patrick Clancy is really the murderer. – Variety
- Like It Or Not, Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms Changed Visual Art
“She made more than 20 variants of her mirrored chambers, which use light, sculpture and reflection to create a kind of 360-degree celestial infinity. They have traveled around the world and reached enormous popularity, forever changing the types of exhibits that are staged and the way the public engages with them.” – CNN (Yahoo!)
- Yayoi Kusama Also Had A Career As A Serious Author
“(She) produc(ed) 12 novels, four volumes of poetry, one collection of short stories, and an autobiography between 1977 and 2002. … Kusama’s novels are dark, violent, and, in many cases, clearly informed by her decade in New York, no matter how emphatically she entreated readers to interpret them otherwise.” – Artnet
- Rotterdam’s Major Art Museum Caught Up In Alleged Municipal Corruption Scheme
“Two municipal employees in the Dutch city of Rotterdam have been dismissed following an investigation into alleged corruption involving construction contracts. They include work connected to asbestos removal at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, one of the country’s most important museums.” – ARTnews
- L.A. Phil To Offer $10 Hollywood Bowl Tickets To Low-Income Locals
“The organization announced this week that it will offer Los Angeles County residents with active Medi-Cal or EBT cards $10 tickets to L.A. Phil performances at the Hollywood Bowl starting with the 2027 season.” – Los Angeles Times (Yahoo!)
- Google Releases An AI Tool For Books That Publishers Actually Like
“Expert Intelligence (is) a feature that allows someone reading an e-book purchased on Google Play’s e-bookstore to interact with the title — by asking questions about the book, taking a quiz after reading it, or producing an infographic of key data.” And it respects copyright. – Publishers Weekly
- Controversy Over Peter Thiel’s Private Viewing Of Bayeux Tapestry
While the exhibition of the massive medieval embroidery at the British Museum hasn’t yet opened to the public, the right-wing tech billionaire was hosted by the museum’s director of development for a private viewing — for which he is reported to have made no donation — on August 18. – The Guardian
- Toronto Symphony’s Five-Year Plan For Concerts In Suburbs
Titled “Symphony Where You Are,” the C$2.3 million partnership with 407 ETR (the company which operates one of the metro area’s major toll highways) will see the orchestra give performances and music education programs in the satellite cities of Brampton, Markham, and Scarborough. – The Toronto Star
- A Fight Over What Everybody Knows
Good Morning,
Authoritarians don’t much care what you think privately. What they fear is common knowledge — everyone knowing that everyone else knows, the moment private grievance becomes public fact. Persuasion makes the game-theory case, and it reads like a job description for culture: art is a vehicle for creating shared reference.
Which reframes today’s institutional frictions. The Kennedy Center board has delayed putting Trump’s name back on the building (ARTnews), while The Atlantic explains why the trustee structure makes the deeper problem unfixable from inside. Governance built for consensus has no defense against capture.
The substrate underneath is moving too. The Walrus reports on what twenty years of social media has done to memory itself, and the LA Times totes up what the $17 billion Meta settlement revealed about the damage.
Then two stories that belong side by side: The Atlantic ran an AI Paul Gigot rebutting the real Paul Gigot on AI, and his decision to run an AI-assisted opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal. And the New York Times visited Arion Press, still setting the Declaration of Independence in metal type. Infinite cheap copies at one end, hand-forged artistry at the other — both arguing about what a text is worth.
And New York has finally scrapped the law requiring a license to dance (Yahoo News). Cue the music.
All our stories below.
- New York’s Arts Ed Programs Are A Powerhouse For The City
Across the city, community-based arts education organizations employ thousands of music educators, teaching artists, arts therapists, accompanists and administrators — together, one of the city’s largest employers of working artists. New York’s real competitive advantage is the ability to attract and retain creative talent. But artists need reliable employment, benefits, professional networks and room to grow. – Crain’s New York
- The Ridiculous Claims For Trump’s Ballroom
The design is rapidly descending into parody—even as Sauer told the court it has been built so solidly that it cannot be demolished, should the court (correctly) so rule. Just like the “unsinkable” Titanic. The ridiculous grand stair from nowhere to nowhere has reappeared on the prominent elevation facing President’s Park. – Architecture and the City
- YouTube’s Growing TV Presence
Love it or hate it, with its viewing figures fast overtaking traditional broadcasters’, YouTube is now undeniably a part of the U.K.’s broadcasting ecosystem. – Variety
- NY Governor Cancels Law Requiring Licenses To Dance
“Dancing? Banned? In New York?! Not anymore,” Hochul said. “Thanks to my administration, you can now cut loose, footloose and kick off your Sunday shoes.” – New York Daily News (Yahoo)
- How Social Media Changed The Ways We Remember
There were ups and downs in the stories I saw people telling, but the trajectory I observed most frequently was an upward one. Growth, expansion, improvement, overcoming. Vacations as burnishments to the image. Illnesses as stress tests, ways of ultimately proving fitness. – The Walrus
- AI Paul Gigot Responds To WSJ Opinion Page Editor Paul Gigot
“I have been thinking about this for close to 20 minutes, and I have concluded that human writing is finished.” – The Atlantic
- The Problem That Can’t (Currently) Be Fixed At The Kennedy Center
Each new development and court filing in opposition makes the same structural problem clearer: A judge can restrain the board’s actions time and time again, but “if the problem is a governance problem, there is not much that a court can do.” – The Atlantic
- Why Dictators Fear “Common Knowledge”
The difference between private knowledge, even when widely shared, and common knowledge is not a mere logical nicety. It can unify knowers in coordinated action and sometimes explode a social status quo. – Persuasion
- Why We Love Trashy Movies
The movies in the good-because-bad canon are not forgettably bad, like cheesy Hallmark fare or the thousandth predictable sequel in a superhero franchise; they are not skillfully and expensively bad, like botched Oscar bait. – The New Yorker