“Amazon looks so good because it has the rest of publishing to compete against. But if those publishers wither, maybe that would not be true.”

“It’s a place that appalls preservationists, reformers and intellectuals — anyone who gets social rewards by decrying noise and garish commercialism. On the other hand, Bourbon Street is incredibly influential. It’s the most recognized place name in the city – and for better or worse, it has exported a vision of New Orleans culture around the world.”

“Enraged by a report that, as well as occupying Gramsci’s old home in Piazza Carlina, the hotel would bear his name, the academics, historians and architects have mobilised against the plan.”

“Just a couple of years after Detroit slid into what the national news media incessantly called a ‘post-apocalyptic’ collapse, the city now teems with a post-post-apocalyptic optimism.”

“Venues funded by Arts Council England are failing to attract new theatregoers and are instead relying on a core regular audience, the findings of a new report have shown.” Who is pulling in new people? The West End.

Today in Los Angeles where businesses, developers, museums, and city governance are changing the reception and application of community grown initiatives, I’ve found a similar question worth asking, “Is creative practice gentrifying creative practice?”

“That art and culture are falling off the organized news media’s map certainly is an affront to those who know and cherish their value, because it translates to a judgment from publishers and content providers that the arts are less worthy of public attention than what else sadly passes for news. Worse, though, in time it has potential to become victim to a self-fulfilling prophecy if everyday people have less access to art and culture, and eventually less incentive to find it.”

“As the arts funding puzzle shifts dramatically under the rubric of creative placemaking—from symphony orchestras to dance companies, and from museums to arts councils—the programs, services, and fundamental kind of art being made will necessarily change to enhance an organization’s competitiveness. This is not a situation that new music stakeholders should take lightly.”

“A group of performers, myself included, left our portakabins to make for the stage within the main building, but shockingly the entire area had suddenly been occupied by about 40 protesters who were blowing klaxons, chanting and yelling, banging metal pans with metal spoons and jostling with police and the theatre’s large security men.”

“The Martians make a visit to Earth. When they get there, everyone on the planet is in a huge meeting. ‘What are they doing’ say the Martians. ‘They’re discussing Peace in the Middle East,’ says one of the Three Wise Persons. … ‘How can it be,’ say the Martians to the Three Wise Persons, ‘that nobody can figure out how to accomplish a thing that everyone seems to want?’”

The DC title Injustice depicts a Superman who has become a global dictator. (He sends the Green Lantern to Congress to break the debt ceiling deadlock.) And the Godzilla spin-off Monstrous looks at what happens after one giant radioactive monster defeats and kills another: the corpse is now toxic waste.

“Russia’s parliament passed a law on Friday to force Internet sites that store the personal data of Russian citizens to do so inside the country, a move the Kremlin says is for data protection but which critics see an attack on social networks. The law will mean that from 2016, all Internet companies will have to move Russian data onto servers based in Russia or face being blocked from the web.”

“In their fight against feared closure, more than 300 residents, according to campaign group Save Braunton Library, borrowed several books each on Saturday.”

“The prosecution alleges film-makers had ‘unlawfully and without authority’ entered onto the railway tracks ‘after receiving, prior to that entry, notice from the owner thereof that such entry was denied’.”

“Whenever Amazon sells a Bonnier e-book, it collects 30 percent of the retail price. But now Amazon wants its share hiked to 50 percent. So far, Bonnier is refusing to budge.”

“The ACE have the arrogance to declare that London vs the rest of the UK is an equal match worth fighting, and one in which funds can be distributed equally between the two. The extensive nature of their report proves that despite their attempts to disguise the vicious nature of the cuts with a garish pink font, the ACE cannot claim ignorance about the existence of a 14:1 imbalance of London’s arts budget compared to the rest of England.”

“New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña announced on Tuesday their plan to put $23 million toward hiring 120 new arts teachers and boosting arts resources in public schools across the city. The plan uses additional money from this year’s budget to guarantee the growth of arts programs in 2015.”

“The new, spectacular opera house, the third largest in the world, with state-of-the-art acoustic design, seating for 1250, three stages, and a vast backstage area as big as an aircraft hangar (to enable the creation of the most elaborate possible sets, no expense spared), is in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan.”

Wolf Trap will announce Tuesday that it will use new supertitle technology that allows audiences to follow the French narrative of the opera in English from their smartphones, tablets or Google Glass eyewear. The technology from Figaro Systems debuts during the July 25 performance of “Carmen.”

“Overall, 33 organisations have been removed from the Arts Council’s roster and three quarters of the 670 organisations have had their funding frozen. The ENO has had its annual grant cut from £17.2m in 2014/15 to £12.4m in the next financial year.”

“GE has used sites like The Economist and Quartz for native advertising to promote itself as a supporter of innovation. But its biggest and most visible effort to date came in March with the introduction of Pressing, a policy news hub that pulls in content from millennial-aimed Vox, where Pressing made a splash as a launch sponsor.”

Even after taking practice out of the equation, “over three-quarters of the genetic variance in music accomplishment remained,” they report. This means that the aforementioned “genetically influenced propensities” to practice “are not sufficient to explain all of the genetic influences on accomplishment.”

“I don’t buy the idea that if our arts organizations die, so will our ability to access art. We’ve seen for more than 2 millennia that art arises from a fundamental human need to both create, and consume, transformative experiences. That will continue for another 2 millennia regardless of our organizational structures or legal tax status.”

The Russian capital’s myriad cultural and history sites – from the Taganka Theater5 to the Bolshoi to the writers’ union clubhouse in The Master and Margarita – have signs posted with codes that lead to a surprisingly rich web site (available to people at home, too) full of history, maps, biographies, and gossip.

“Harl recalled two mounds in the town of Fenton, Missouri, that were leveled to build a Walmart. The site of a 1,000-year-old village in Bridgeton, Missouri, was flattened to build an industrial park.”

“American results on the literacy and technology tests were somewhat better, in the sense that they were only mediocre.”

“That the most rapidly expanding U.S. metro area is a Manhattan-sized retirement village — with more golf carts than New York has taxis — highlights the transformation of the world’s demographic profile. The over-60 set — which the United Nations projects will almost triple to 2 billion by 2050 — offers opportunity to marketers and homebuilders even as it confounds governments that must care for an aging populace.”

“The fact is that by focusing exclusively on monetary issues, the current conversation prevents us not only from remembering the higher objectives of an undergraduate education, but also from recognizing just how bad a job our institutions have been doing at fulfilling them. Colleges and universities have a lot to answer for; if they want to regain the support of the larger society, they need to prove that they are worthy of it.”

“While technology has often been hailed as the great equalizer of educational opportunity, a growing body of evidence indicates that in many cases, tech is actually having the opposite effect: It is increasing the gap between rich and poor, between whites and minorities, and between the school-ready and the less-prepared.”