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- Upcoming in BerlinA ‘Pandora’s Box’ of Life’s Struggles and Wonders<a href="https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/2025/06/upcoming-in-berlina-pandoras-box-of-lifes-struggles-and-wonders.html" title="Upcoming in Berlin
A ‘Pandora’s Box’ of Life’s Struggles - Canada’s Official Archives Are In Peril
After Confederation, some of the country’s oldest records were stashed in a loft in the reading room of the Centre Block on Parliament Hill. That’s where a fire started in 1916 that destroyed the whole building, along with many historic treasures. – The Walrus
- The Met Museum’s Difficult Line Through Its Re-thought African Collection
The wing’s design stresses each region’s singularity while fostering an atmosphere of cosmopolitan exchange. We’re meant to feel that the Met is no longer what the writer Ishmael Reed described a half century ago: “the Center for Art Detention.” – The New Yorker
- The Struggle For A “Self” We Recognize
We imagine our choices are free, our selves sovereign, but much of our behavior arises automatically. We are driven by inner conditions, social cues, learned scripts, and neural flows—just as the machine is driven by token prediction and loss minimization. The difference, of course, is that the human brain is plastic. – Hedgehog Review
- We All Read. But Our Reading Has Changed. This Has Changed Our Culture (And Not For The Better)
On average, we spend more than two hours scrolling through such platforms each day. But not all reading is created equal. The mind can skim over the surface of a sentence and swiftly decode its literal meaning. But deep reading — sustained engagement with a longform text — is a distinct endeavor. – Vox
- What Toni Morrison Was Like As An Editor
Her unwavering commitment to shoring up the integrity of a book at every stage solidified her legacy as an editor who could turn talent, hers and that of the authors she published, into cultural and literary power. – Slate
- Kennicott On The Met Museum’s Non-European Wing: Making The Case For Context
To appreciate these works only as visual objects exacerbates the intellectual violence of decontextualization. The Met has responded to this by writing extensive object labels and wall texts, carefully parsed but unflinching even when subjects, such as headhunting, may make some visitors uncomfortable. – Washington Post
- How Much Do You Know About Publishing At The Beginnings Of America?
Which of America’s founding fathers began writing his memoirs in the early 1770s, a project that remained unfinished when it was posthumously published in 1793? – The New York Times
- Jordan Roth Made A Career Getting Other People’s Work Onto Broadway. Now He’s Making His Own
“I worked for a long time facilitating other people’s creativity, and that was very meaningful and very fulfilling, but I started to miss my own,” Roth, 49, told me during a rehearsal break at a black box studio in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighborhood. – The New York Times
- The 21st Century’s Best Movies Reveal The Collapse Of Genre
What strikes me most about the list is this: Long-held categories in the movie business are fading, just like they are in the broader culture. – The New York Times
- Hollywood’s Big AI Dilemma
The idea that AI-generated video is both the future of filmmaking and an existential threat to Hollywood has caught on like wildfire among boosters for the relatively new technology. – The Verge
- The Relevance Of Glee, A Decade After It Ended
“I was mad that the representation, whether of teenagers or queerness, was not completely akin to my own real-life experience — this show was my lifeline; the least it could have done was conform to my limited perception of reality, right?” – HuffPost
- Pocahontas Came Out Three Decades Ago, But Gen Z Is Making Its Signature Song A Rallying Cry
The movie isn’t seen as progressive, but “on TikTok, people … have reinterpreted the ‘Colors of the Wind’ lyrics to comment on an array of contemporary topics they feel strongly about, like immigration, the Middle East, the president and Elon Musk, Black Lives Matter and oil drilling.” – The New York Times
- China Is Arresting Women Who Write Sexy Gay Stories
“Although authors of heterosexual erotica have been jailed in China, observers say the genre is subjected to far less censorship. Gay erotica, which is more subversive, seems to bother authorities more.” – BBC
- Documentary Makers Fear Being Turned Into Criminals By A Harsh New British Law
“We are being advised that the curtailing of Palestine Action could have a major knock-on effect for us as it could become not only illegal for others to voice support for them but also for us, as film-makers, to distribute this film.” – The Guardian (UK)
- Just How Big Is Romantasy, As A Genre?
Oh, it’s big. Rebecca Yarros’s Onyx Storm “came out earlier this year and sold 2.7 million copies in its first week,” for instance. – NPR
- There Will Never Be Another Editor Like Vogue’s Anna Wintour
For one thing, the decline of print media is too stark. “Yes, there are still front rows to sit in, parties to attend. But the day to day of the job is overseeing a tangle of revenue and content streams.” – The New York Times
- Transforming A Sports Arena Into A Concert Venue Takes A Steady Hand
“Five times a year, art is sandwiched by science. It typically takes four to five days to transform T-Mobile Park into one of Seattle’s most versatile concert venues, before the bells and whistles are deconstructed in an overnight sprint.” – Seattle Times
- This Author Decided To Focus-Group The Novel, Or Rather, Two
The least wanted novel contains a mix of “such ostensibly despised elements as stream of consciousness, explicit sex scenes, an extraterrestrial setting, metafictional commentary on novel-writing itself, talking animals, second-person narration, and tennis.” (Tennis?) – Slate
- The Perils Of Writing About Family, And Having Family Write About You
Esther Freud writes novels inspired by her life; now her sister is writing memoir on Instagram. “How strange, over this last year, to read my sister’s interpretation of events. Free from the wiles of fiction, her voice rings out, clear and clean.” – The Guardian (UK)
- Life In A Contemporary Touring Circus
“It has traditional skills and tricks and excitement, but instead of being a traditional succession of acts it’s a completely theatrical experience: a rollercoaster of a show.” Then there are the foxes that sneak in at night and steal costumes. – Irish Times
- A Dispatch From Los Angeles On First Impressions Of The New LACMA
Critic Christopher Knight does not, let’s say, find it great: “Grieg’s ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’ meets Beckett’s theater of the absurd.” – Los Angeles Times (MSN)
- Oh, This Seems Fine: Meta Wants Access To All Of Our Photos For Its AI Scraping Plans
And we do mean all of our photos – everything on the camera roll. “Meta’s public stance is that the feature is ‘very early,’ innocuous and entirely opt-in.” Sure, Jan. – The Verge (Internet Archive)
- The Backlash Against Generated AI Is Gaining Steam
Why? “Unlike the dawn of the internet where democratized access to information empowered everyday people in unique, surprising ways, the generative AI era has been defined by half-baked software releases and threats of AI replacing human workers.” – Wired
- The Crew Of Rust Settle Their Civil Lawsuit With The Movie’s Producers
The three crew members “accused the film’s producers of negligence and failing to follow industry safety rules, allegations that the producers denied.” – The New York Times
- AI Slop Is Increasing To Such An Extent That The Open Web May Die
And be replaced with … people and print? “Indie local news publishers I know, already frustrated by the junkiness of digital distribution, are increasingly turning to in-person events, print editions and zines and printed handout cards with QR codes.” – Matt Pearce
- Making the Creative Turn: Is Using AI Cheating?
Throughout the digital age, Big Tech has promised us products that will make us more efficient and save time, which, it is assumed, is always an obvious good. It’s a cliché that tools shape the things we make. And through most of our history, better tools have helped us create better things. But what if this isn’t always true? - Don’t Try To Make Henry Golding The Next James Bond
“That’s every actor’s kind of nightmare. … Why can’t they bring out more agents or more OO’s? I think that would be so much more fun because there just isn’t the restraints and the expectation.” – Variety
- No, See, Apple Can Make a Hit Movie
All you need are fast cars and Brad Pitt: “The well-reviewed sports movie [F1] led the weekend box office derby in North America, giving Apple a much-needed win in theaters after several misfires, including Argylle and Fly Me to the Moon.” – The New York Times
- The Long Fight To Replace Racist Monuments In The United States
“After nearly half a decade, Vinnie Bagwell, a self-taught sculptor-artist, is still waiting for the million dollars that the New York City department of cultural affairs promised for her to work on monument Victory Beyond Sims.” – The Guardian (UK)
- The Woman Helming The Color Purple In Chicago
“It’s organized chaos at rehearsal for The Color Purple on a recent afternoon at the Goodman Theatre downtown,” but “director Lili-Anne Brown looks on with expert calm.” – Chicago Sun-Times
- The Bookbinding Family Of Paris
“The women who run the Atelier Devauchelle in Paris sew and create new bindings. They restore old bindings and torn pages. They create slipcovers and special boxes to protect fragile books.” – The New York Times
- The Artist Who Got Catfished By A Fake Lady Gaga
“Needless to say, this was not a situation [Emma] Webster expected to encounter as an up and coming artist.” – The New York Times
- How A Music Librarian Convinced Sondheim To Leave His Smoke-Singed Papers To The Nation
A personalized tour of the Library of Congress “included original manuscripts from composers Béla Bartók, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Igor Stravinsky and Johannes Brahms. … But it was American composer George Gershwin’s manuscript for the 1935 opera Porgy and Bess that moved Sondheim to tears.” – CBC
- Authors Ask Big Five Publishers To Promise Never To Use AI
The letter “asks them to refrain from publishing books written using AI tools built on copyrighted content without authors’ consent or compensation, to refrain from replacing publishing house employees wholly or partially with AI tools, and to only hire human audiobook narrators.” – NPR
