Here are today’s AJ highlights. Hollywood’s “oracle” narrates an industry cruising toward structural collapse, from streaming economics to vanishing theater audiences (The New York Times). The Phillips Collection plans to sell O’Keeffes and Seurats to fund new acquisitions, a move former curators call a betrayal of the founder’s vision (Washington Post). Public media is under strain too: inside the BBC’s latest political crisis and a separate op-ed asking, with some exasperation, “Oh, BBC, what are you doing?”
Music and tech collide on multiple fronts. AI-generated tracks climb charts as The New Yorker and n+1 both chart how a handful of corporations and algorithms reshape what we hear, while an L.A. Times columnist wonders whether software pattern-matching counts as actually “writing” music. Schools become another battleground: a New York Times columnist bluntly connects classroom screens to plummeting performance, while BookRiot traces how “Take Back the Classroom” is weaponizing that anxiety against authors and books.
Editor’s Note: Platforms, governments, and billionaires are busy redesigning the conditions around culture — who gets seen, heard, preserved, or erased. Today’s stories trace the counter-movers: artists, educators, and small institutions insisting that attention, privacy, and imagination are not just product features.
The rest of today’s stories below:
