AJ Four Ways:
Text Only (by date) | headlines only
- 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Pennsylvania and Florida legislators argue, for example, that an informed citizenry needs to be able to read historical documents, which are often written in cursive script.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
- 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
- Four Comics At Edinburgh Fringe Explain How They Developed Their Very Odd Characters
For instance, Sam Eley gives the background on his Basil Crumbwick, whose papier-mâché head makes him seven feet tall, while Katie Pritchard recounts the origin story of her Sir Elton Scone, who hosts a Great British Bake Off-style show which uses no ovens. – The Guardian
- How The Kennedy Center Plans To Put Trump’s Name Back
- What’s Changed In Classical Music Over 50 Years
What has surprised me, looking back to 1976 (when I started writing for a tiny magazine that sadly went out of business this year) is how much of the classical music landscape has survived, despite the economic pressures that you don’t need reminding about. – BBC Music
- 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
- Paul Simon’s “Graceland” At 40
Hard as it may be to believe today, Graceland was not an instant hit when it came out, and Simon received criticism for what’s now called cultural appropriation and for violating sanctions against apartheid-era South Africa. Now its influence is widespread enough that it can be hard to perceive these decades later. – The Guardian
- How Adam Sklute Transformed Salt Lake City’s Ballet West
The ways that the company’s skill level, repertoire, national and international reputation, budget, and especially school (a ten-fold increase in enrollment) have grown during Sklute’s 20 years as artistic director are extraordinary. – The Utah Review
- Scammers Are Posing As Terry Gross To Catfish Authors And Media Figures
Comedy writer Brice Vilanch and psychologist Steven Pinker are among those who’ve been contacted by someone claiming to be NPR host Gross herself or co-host Tonya Mosley (not a producer) offering an interview on Fresh Air, displaying deep knowledge of the target’s work, then asking for “contributions.” – The Philadelphia Inquirer (MSN)
- 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
- 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
- Utah Bans Novel Adapted Into Movie “Precious” From Schools
“’Push’ by Sapphire got cut across the state Wednesday after the Davis, Granite and Washington County school districts removed it, bringing the total number of books banned from public schools to 37.” Current Utah law holds that if three county school districts ban a book, the title is then barred statewide. – The Salt Lake Tribune
- L.A. Could Lose 4,500 Film/TV Jobs And Billions In Economy From Paramount-Warner Merger: Study
“Overall, the economic impact of losing these jobs would be $1.26 billion in wages, $2.78 billion in economic value, $4.06 billion in total business output and $547 million in tax revenue, including $78.6 million in local taxes — most of which (63%) comes from property taxes.” – TheWrap
- Who Vouches For The Work Now?
Good Morning,
Google has built a tool that tells fact-checkers whether an image was machine-made, whether it’s been altered, and where else it has surfaced (Nieman Lab). Provenance as a service — infrastructure for a question that didn’t really need infrastructure five years ago.
Which makes the day’s other verification story more difficult. Harvard is closing its writing center, and faculty read the timing as of a piece with the university’s enthusiasm for AI on campus (The Atlantic). We’re building machines to certify authorship while shutting the institutions where people learn to earn it. Small wonder 52% of Americans now say AI worries them more than it excites them, up from 37% in 2021 (Pew Research). The anxiety isn’t about capability. It’s about not knowing who made what, or who answers for it when it goes wrong.
No algorithm would have caught the first L.A. Jazz Festival, which imploded on opening day and left the scene that had lent it credibility furious (Los Angeles Times).
What people do trust: a place with something happening in it. Ragtime closed as the highest-grossing production in Lincoln Center Theater’s history (Deadline). And Gia Kourlas watched a champion surfer and saw a dancer (The New York Times). The map of what counts as choreography just got a little bigger.
The rest of today’s stories below.
- Could Disney Actually Win Its Lawsuit Against FCC Over Threats To ABC’s License?
“Disney has a far stronger case against (Trump-appointed FCC chairman Brendan) Carr than Carr has against Disney,” a former FCC chief of staff said. “I doubt any court would uphold Carr’s failure to renew Disney’s license.” Alas, it’s not quite that simple. – TheWrap (Yahoo!)
- In Russia: The Publishers’ Plot
In May 2025, ten people affiliated with Eksmo, Russia’s publishing behemoth, were detained in Moscow. Three of them, Pavel Ivanov, Dmitry Protopopov and Artyom Vakhlyaev, were charged with ‘organising activities of an extremist organisation’. Their crime was distributing LGBT-themed books. – London Review of Books
- Why Ever More Of Hollywood’s Production Is Happening Anywhere But Hollywood
“Los Angeles and California continue to struggle to keep movies, television series and even game shows from fleeing elsewhere. … The story of how L.A. steadily lost much of its homegrown industry to other locales is a tale of hubris, escalating costs, political inaction and fierce competition (from other locales).” – Los Angeles Times (MSN)
- 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
- Why The Closing Of Harvard’s Writing Center Matters
A Harvard faculty member who requested anonymity so that he could speak openly told me he worried that the elimination of the center could be seen as part of a broader trend of “real boosterism” of AI on campus—one that students feel acutely. – The Atlantic
- 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
- A Dance Critic Considers High-Level Surfing As Ballet
Gia Kourlas on champion Caitlin Simmers: “Her undulating torso, her sensitivity to the fluctuations of an unsteady surface and her speed are all part of her power. … Her clarity comes from her deep center of gravity, which allows her to slice up and down waves like a silken ribbon.” – The New York Times
- How Melancholy Became Hungary’s Literary Brand
Melancholy, an affinity with oblivion without a concrete cause, suffuses the Hungarian fiction translated for foreign audiences over the past 30 years, from the tortured tales of Sándor Márai to the taut novels of Magda Szabó. – The Guardian
- Did Smartphones Really Kill Reading?
It is tempting to blame smartphones for this condition and conclude that some kind of ban would solve the problem. But a historical perspective shows that this is not enough: reading was in decline before the smartphone appeared. – LitHub
- New Website Tracks Author Events
LitCircle’s database will track author readings and signings, as well as book clubs and literary festivals across the country, and alert readers to upcoming literary programming in their vicinity. George partnered with Patrick DiMichele, a technology consultant and a longtime Volumes customer, to build the platform. – Publishers Weekly
- To Promote Themselves, Some Standup Comics Are Switching From Posting Videos To This
“They use (comic strip-style) still frames with embedded captions of jokes, sometimes across multiple images that include longer setups and punchlines — in social media parlance, a carousel.” – The New York Times
- Colombian Cultural Heritage Sites Damaged In The Earthquake
The report, published on 14 August, identifies 40 nationally protected cultural properties in the seven departments hardest hit by the disaster that suffered some degree of damage, 22 of which were severely impacted. Of the remaining properties, 13 suffered moderate damage and five were only lightly affected. – The Art Newspaper
- 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
- “Ragtime” Sets Lincoln Center Theatre Box Office Record
- Google Now Has An AI Tool To Catch Fake AI Images
“After (a fact-checker) upload(s) an image and enter(s) a basic question, Backstory can automatically run checks to determine whether the image is AI-generated, whether it shows signs of manipulation, and where else the image has appeared throughout its lifetime on the internet.” – Nieman Lab
- How The First-Ever L.A. Jazz Festival Collapsed On Its Opening Day
Founder Martin Ludlow, a former City Councilman, hoped that his star-studded multi-day event could ultimately become a peer to the great jazz fests in New Orleans and Montreal. Instead it came out looking more like Fyre Festival, and some say Ludlow was very much the wrong person to organize it. – Los Angeles Times (MSN)
- Many Of New York City’s Most Prominent Cultural Institutions Don’t Pay Fines For Fire Code Violations
The Met Museum, Carnegie Hall, BAM, Lincoln Center, even the Brooklyn Children’s Museum — in fact, none of the 39 institutions in what’s called the Cultural Institutions Group have to pay Fire Dept. summonses. There is, in fact, a logical reason for this. – Gothamist
- Soprano Ileana Cotrubaș Is Dead At 87
One of the opera world’s most admired lyric sopranos of the 1970s and ‘80s, she was known for her acting skill as well as her voice, especially in such roles as Violetta in La Traviata, Gilda in Rigoletto, and Tatiana in Eugene Onegin. – Moto Perpetuo
- Penguin Random House Suspends New Mamdani Biography Following Plagiarism Accusations Against Author
The publisher has halted promotion and public sales of The Revolutionary: Zohran Mamdani and the Remaking of American Politics by Ross Barkan in the wake of allegations that the author plagiarized parts of numerous columns he wrote as a freelancer for New York magazine. – The Washington Post (MSN)
- This Summer’s European Heat Waves Are Damaging Monet’s Gardens At Giverny
Horticultural staff are reporting that some foliage is scorched and many flowers are wilting, though they’ve been able to mitigate the weather’s worst effects by careful watering and moving some plants around. Chief gardeners also say they may have to change some of the seasonal scheduling and choice of plantings. – ARTnews
- Kennedy Center Management Explains Why That Tarp Is Still There
The fabric barrier and scaffolding put up while Trump’s name was removed from the building’s façade are still in place more than two months later. In a court filing this week, management stated that there is still work being done at and around that area. – The Independent (UK)