Good Morning,
New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is paying for 70,000 Metropolitan Opera tickets to be given away by lottery, and a conservative columnist says the Right should be embarrassed that a self-proclaimed socialist thought of it first, though he expects it to convert only “a few thousand” New Yorkers (UnHerd). In Hungary, bookshops file nearly every short Japanese-style poem under haiku, senryū included, and the poet Zsolt L. Rakusz says the form took hold there because Hungarian poets already had the epigram (Asymptote).
Houston’s Ensemble Theatre, the city’s oldest Black theater company, opens its 50th season; it began in a converted pet store at 1010 Tuam Street with 60 to 75 seats (Texas Observer). Nathalie Stutzmann, music director of the Atlanta Symphony, conducted the first Rienzi ever heard in Bayreuth’s Festspielhaus and says she wants Atlanta to have a sound people can recognize, the way they once knew Ozawa’s Boston (ArtsATL).
Ben Affleck says he used AI “for lots of things” in Animals, his Netflix thriller opening October 9, but won’t say which, comparing it to a magician announcing the plant in the audience; he sold his AI company InterPositive to Netflix for nearly $600 million (The Hollywood Reporter).
And the San Antonio Philharmonic sued Harmonium of Texas, the orchestra founded by its former music director Jeffrey Kahane, the day before Harmonium’s first rehearsals, alleging he used donor and email lists to start it (San Antonio Express-News).
All of our stories below.