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- Seaside Towns In Brittany Are Fed Up With Parisian Tourists
“The anger is running high across Finistère, where local populations swell to triple their normal size every summer, and heatwave conditions in the south of France have added to the influx this year. … Hostile messages have been scratched on car doors, and holidaymakers from Paris have had insults hurled at them on the street.” – The Telegraph (UK) (MSN)
- Can Poetry Help Make People More Ecologically Aware?
Researchers have argued that eco-poetry can influence how we experience a place, what we notice and what it might become in the future. They suggest that by “sounding” environmental change, speculative poetry offers us a tangible way to engage with, interpret and navigate the uncertainty of the climate crisis. – The Conversation
- Performing An Entire Disney Musical With A Seven-Pound Flaming Candle On Each Hand
“There’s an entire team at work behind the scenes and a good-natured actor who doesn’t mind flames, sweating and being unable to use his hands for the entire run time (of Beauty and the Beast). Making it work is a show unto itself.” – Los Angeles Times (Yahoo!)
- Judge Halts Auction Of Titanic Artifacts
A controversial plan to auction off artifacts recovered from the wreck of the Titanic must be put on hold, a federal judge ruled Monday, after the U.S. government and preservationists raised concerns about the sale and the company’s care of the artifacts. – Washington Post
- Report: Revenue Cratered At The Kennedy Center After Name Change
Ticket sales had already dropped in the10 months following Trump’s takeover, but both ticket sales and donations plunged after the Trump-led board of trustees voted in December to rename the center after him and put his name on the front of the building, according to the records. – Washington Post
- Report: Museum Heists In Europe Are Becoming More Violent
The report highlights a concerning rise in violent and forceful tactics, alongside a growing focus on high-value items such as precious metals, gemstones, and culturally significant artefacts. – Insight EU
- Translating Japanese Video Games Into English Can Be Quite The Challenge
“Modern localization, especially for video games, happens at a massive scale today. … A large update for (a) game can contain about 200,000 words, enough for a lengthy novel; major expansions to its world and story can approach 500,000 words. The English localization team can grow to more than 10 people.” – The Washington Post (Yahoo!)
- The “Worst” Year For Classical Music Institutions?
What she told me was a little alarming: “2025-2026 is the worst year for classical arts organizations since I’ve started doing this work.” The reason for this goes deep into the deficiencies of arts funding. – San Francisco Classical Voice
- The Warnings From The Digital Age That Should Inform The AI Age
The adoption and diffusion of such technologies led to wild-eyed speculation about their possible social and political consequences, a discussion that, characteristically, ricocheted between dreams of a technological utopia and fears of an artificial state. – The Guardian
- Is The Next Gen City A Marriage Of Tech And Nature?
If the Anthropocene began when the Industrial Revolution set industry against the living world, the Symbiocene imagines what should follow: interspecies democracy, life within Earth’s limits, and ecological reciprocity. – Aeon
- Australia’s Recording Industry Bans AI-Generated Music From The Charts
“The Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA), the trade group representing the country’s music industry, has banned wholly AI-generated songs from its weekly charts that showcase the most popular tracks in Australia.” – Variety
- The Problem(s) With Trying To Define Intelligence
What is Intelligence? simply reduces everything to physical implementations, either in AI neural networks or in the brain, and often conflates the two. – Inference Review
- Latino Group Opposes Paramount/Warner Deal
A prominent Latino group is raising fresh concerns about Paramount Skydance’s proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, saying the blockbuster deal would crush Latino workers and small businesses that support Hollywood. – Los Angeles Times
- Historic LA Performing Center Reopens After 15-Year Renovation
After a 15-year renovation, South L.A.’s historic Vision Theatre Performing Arts Center is reopening, marking a major milestone for Leimert Park and a $40-million investment in Black arts and culture. – Los Angeles Times
- Hollywood Trade Mag Pays Farewell Tribute To Gustavo Dudamel
“He doesn’t have a pretentious bone in his body, eagerly embracing the way … rockers bashed away at a late-19th-century Russian suite. And just as eagerly, he embraced the world of film music so completely that he became only the second LA Phil music director with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.” – TheWrap
- For These Movement Artists, It’s Not Site-Specific Dance, It’s “Site-Responsive Dance”
“Fluency in a variety of movement techniques — including street dance, acrobatics and, especially, parkour — allows these dancers to shape seemingly unbounded interactions with their environments. Is that chain-link fence asking to be hurdled with a flip? Could those four stories of scaffolding become a creative jungle gym?” – The New York Times
- Dutch Broadcaster Says It Will Boycott Eurovision Song Contest Again
“AVROTROS will not participate in the Eurovision Song Contest in 2027 because the event can no longer be considered neutral, with a participating country still involved in a large-scale military conflict,” the network said, though the decision on the Netherlands’ participation remains up to national public broadcaster NPO. – AP
- Meet Mamdani’s, And NYC’s, New Arts Commissioner
Diya Vij: “We know the presence of art in a neighborhood leads to better outcomes in health, safety and education. We know it matters to the economy, to people’s bodies, to relationships, to their ability to find each other. On a policy level, it’s essential to the full life of a New Yorker.” – Gothamist
- Elections Flip Control Of Florida School Board At Center Of Book Bans And Culture Wars
“Two Democratic-backed candidates beat out conservatives in Tuesday’s school board election in Sarasota, Florida, flipping the board’s majority. Helmed for the past year by a co-founder of Moms for Liberty, … the board is moving in a new direction, the winners said.” – The Washington Post (Yahoo!)
- UK Looks Headed For Record Year In Print Book Sales
According to NielsenIQ BookScan, sales of print books across the British consumer market have passed £1 billion at the earliest point in the calendar year since records began. – The Bookseller (UK)
- Russian Drone Strikes Hit Art Museum In Kherson
“According to a report by United24, the Ukrainian government–run platform, the fire destroyed the museum’s historic plasterwork, parquet flooring, furniture, and books, as well as the building’s electrical and heating infrastructure.” No human casualties were reported. – ARTnews
- Prove You’re Human
Good Morning,
A small publisher, buried under AI-generated pitches, will now take them only by phone (Nieman Lab). When producing a plausible submission costs nothing, the only useful filter is one the machine can’t cheaply fake, and right now that’s a voice on a live line.
That verification cost is everywhere. More than a million people have already clicked LinkedIn’s AI-reporter button (The Verge), so the slop is arriving faster than anyone can sort it. Police have been reduced to announcing that the Cat in the Hat is not real, after AI TikToks persuaded people otherwise (BBC). SFMOMA’s AI-assisted Matisse poses the institutional version: what exactly is a museum vouching for when it hangs one (The Atlantic)?
The distribution end of culture, meanwhile, is being settled in private. Trump intervened in the Live Nation antitrust prosecution (WSJ), while California’s attorney general walked out of Paramount settlement talks and looks set to demand channel divestitures (The New York Times).
And in Iceland, where murders barely happen, crime novelists work overtime to make a body believable (The New York Times). Scarcity as a craft problem.
All of our stories below.
- The Classical Music Superfans
These stories from the classical music world are particularly jarring. It’s easy to stomach the idea of Swifties doing what they do: that’s part of their culture. But classical music fans have long cultivated an image of sophistication. – The Conversation
- Was Howard Zinn’s “People’s History” Too Simplistic?
Zinn presented his readers with genuinely admirable dissidents, from Bartolomé de las Casas to Ida Tarbell and Langston Hughes. At a moment when the country needs effective dissidents, Zinn, the scholar-activist, is in that pantheon. But A People’s History’s had flaws: It can flatten complex problems and people into apparently simple ones. – The New Republic
- Why Is It So Hard To Buy Movie Tickets Right Now?
Theater chain apps suffered apparent outages as moviegoers waited in long virtual lines, hoping to finally glimpse a seat map with some empty spots left on it. In Manhattan, those who have grown mistrustful of this unreliable tech found time on a weekday morning to line up around the block at AMC Lincoln Square. – Wired
- Smithsonian Considers Workaround For National Latino Museum
On Aug. 31, the Smithsonian will consider whether to give the Latino Museum its Arts and Industries Building, which was built in 1881 and is on the National Mall between the Smithsonian’s Castle and Hirshhorn Museum. – The New York Times
- Remembering Miami’s Coconut Grove Playhouse
Over the next 50 years, until its sudden closing in 2006, the playhouse earned a reputation as one of the leading regional theaters in the country, producing a mix of classic and new plays, many of them hits and some flops. – Miami Herald
- Does AI Really Belong In A Museum?
It’s not like most of these flyers were ever going to be high art anyway. Still, the issue nags at me constantly, whenever I pass one of these synthetic images plastered over the real world. – The Atlantic
- Study: Language Skills Don’t Decline In Older Adults
Unless impaired by a stroke or dementia, most older people retain their language skills and may even improve them as they steadily gain vocabulary throughout their lives. A new brain imaging study from an MIT-Boston University collaboration now reveals the neural activity underlying this observation. – MIT News
- California Attorney General Cancels Paramount Settlement Talks
Rob Bonta, the attorney general, called off the meeting late Sunday, accusing Paramount of acting in bad faith. In a statement to The Times, Mr. Bonta accused Paramount of leaking details of a meeting the parties held on Friday. – The New York Times
- Trump Intervened In The LiveNation Antitrust Prosecution
The Justice Department was preparing to wage a legal battle more than a decade in the making against the world’s largest concert promoter. Then President Trump called. Settle it, the president told a senior DOJ official, the official later told associates. – The Wall Street Journal
- California Expected To Ask Paramount To Divest Channels From Warner Deal
California Attorney General Rob Bonta is expected to ask Paramount to divest some cable channels and commit to keeping its movie studio separate from Warner Bros. before he signs off on the $81 billion merger, people familiar with the matter said. – The Wall Street Journal
- In A Country With Almost No Actual Murders, Writers Have To Make Mysterious Deaths Believable
The authors’ “plots have to be built on buried grudges and horrifying secrets hidden in the fog and the fjords. Otherwise, how else could they convincingly kill off their characters?” – The New York Times
- LinkedIn Added An AI Slop Button, And People Are Clicking It A Whole, Whole Lot
Since July 30th, more than a million people have clicked on the button accessible on each post. – The Verge
- This Small Publisher Will Now Only Accept Pitches By Phone
The strategies to defeat AI are getting, well, old-school: “We’re re-humanizing the process with a dedicated hotline (which has the added benefit of weeding out supposed reporters who aren’t in the habit of ringing up strangers.” – Nieman Lab