It seems wrongheaded to feel wistful for a time when students had far less information at their fingertips. And who can blame them for letting AI do much of the work that they are likely to let AI do anyway when they enter the real world? - The Atlantic

 There’s something about motion that triggers creative thoughts. This has been true for a long time. Charles Darwin’s budding theory of evolution jelled while he was riding in the back of a carriage. “I can remember the very spot on the road … when to my joy the solution occurred to me,” he wrote later. - The Walrus

The structure of our societies is such that when you’re wealthy, availability of The Commons is of negligible benefit. However, when your private command over resources is limited, i.e. you’re broke, the “cultural-infrastructure” determining which level of access to which resources is permissible, may set the entire course of your life. - 3 Quarks Daily

As the tech industry and corporate America go all in on artificial intelligence, some people are holding back. - Washington Post

Orwell’s name has too often been flattened into an adjective, and 1984 into mere speculative fiction. - The Atlantic

Sam Altman, OpenAI’s leader, had proclaimed it “the most powerful imagination engine ever built.” The truth is that using it made me want to run, screaming, into the ocean. - The New York Times

Located about 70 miles north of Phoenix, Arcosanti is the only “arcology” — Paolo Soleri’s portmanteau for compact, self-sufficient communities that fuse architecture and ecology — to materialize in the real world. - Bloomberg

The White House was never meant to be a palace, nor the Oval Office a throne room. The East Wing was the living artery of the White House, the First Lady’s offices, the Social Office, the machinery of ceremonial democracy where symbolism gets translated into human scale. - Rick Wilson

“Overcoming the contradiction between dream and reality, (Breton and his fellow Surrealists) believed, would complement the class struggle between the global proletariat and its bourgeois oppressors. Surrealism was much more than a merely artistic project — it was also a means toward a larger political end.” - The Conversation

Revenue from the tax, collected on hotel rooms and rental cars in Bexar County, may be used for sports arenas and parks, but also performing arts venues and associated infrastructure. Here's what's on the two ballot proposition in November (one of which would fund a new San Antonio Spurs arena). - San Antonio Report

Under the new policy, Ticketmaster says it will limit all individuals and entities, including professional resellers, to a single verified account tied to a unique taxpayer ID. Accounts that appear duplicative or fraudulent will be canceled. - TicketNews

By adapting the community land trust model — a strategy long used to preserve affordable housing for teachers, city workers, and other essential labor sectors — the group is securing permanently affordable, community-owned homes and creative spaces for artists. - NextCity

Pitchfork has historically been a one-sided affair. While it ran the occasional reader poll, there was no way for readers to directly voice their opinion on the site. - The Verge

“Today’s $8 billion payout is a testament to the fact that the twin engine of ads and subscriptions is firing on all cylinders,” said YouTube’s Global Head of Music, Lyor Cohen, in a statement. - TechCrunch

“Isola Della Musica will be situated on a newly-built square island between Hanoi's West Lake and Đam Tri Lake. … Renzo Piano Building Workshop and PTW Architects conceived a bulbous concrete building (clad in pearlescent ceramic tile) that will contain a 1,800-seat opera hall and a 1,000-seat convention hall.” - Dezeen

“The San Antonio Philharmonic has postponed its Classics III concerts, scheduled for the weekend of Nov. 7-8, marking the second time one of the orchestra’s fall events has been rescheduled for a later date. The Catrina Ball, a United Way fundraiser …, was also postponed from its Nov. 1-2 dates.” - San Antonio Current

Eric Lu, a 27-year-old pianist from Massachusetts, won the International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition, becoming the first American since 1970 to receive the top honor in a contest regarded by some as the Olympics of classical music. - Washington Post

Alan Fletcher took the helm at the festival and school in 2006, oversaw the construction of the $80 million Bucksbaum Campus, and established several new education programs as well as (with Renée Fleming and Patrick Summers) the Aspen Opera Theater and VocalARTS program. He retires at the end of 2026. - Aspen Public Radio

Joanna Koerten was regularly visited by nobles and even royalty; a contemporary poet compared her skill with paper to Michelangelo’s with paint; one of her pieces sold for over twice what Rembrandt got for The Night Watch. Her work is now on view at D.C.'s National Museum of Women in the Arts. - Artnet

Sotheby’s said the items to be sold are estimated to draw bids in excess of $50 million. Any extra proceeds not needed to retire the debt and any unsold artworks will be returned to Okada Fine Arts, which is controlled by Okada. - The New York Times

“When you’re in a hurry, the Böcker Agilo carries your heavy treasures,” the ad boasted under a photo of the lift parked outside the Louvre. - The New York Times

There are subtle differences between the images of authoritarians and elected leaders, in body language and other details. Is the leader acting as a quality-control agent, asking questions, studying details? Or surveying his domain in miniature? Is he simply toying with the world? - Washington Post

In the case of $1.7 worth of gold nuggets stolen from the mineralogy gallery at Paris’s Natural History Museum on Sept. 16, a 24-year-old Chinese woman was arrested on September 30 while trying to dispose of almost a kilogram of melted-down gold in Barcelona. - AFP (Yahoo!)

“Everybody in the business is talking about this right now,” said Robert Wittman, a former art-crime investigator with the Federal Bureau of Investigation who runs his own art-recovery practice. By everybody, he means both jewelry thieves and the private investigating firms who make a living hunting them down. - The Wall Street Journal

“A history of an “unruly appendage”, a look at the sadly neglected post-war Montreal erotic art scene and a scientific tome tackling whether fish can recognise themselves in a mirror are among the six shortlistees in The Bookseller’s Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year 2025.” - The Bookseller (UK)

“The Children’s Booker Prize, offering £50,000 (roughly $67,000) for the best fiction written for readers aged eight to 12, … will launch in 2026, with the first winner announced in early 2027. It will be decided by a mixed panel of adult and child judges, a first for a Booker award.” - The Guardian

“Poems from an Attic: Selected Poems, 1936–1995, to be published on 6 November, brings together decades of work that Murdoch largely kept private, stored for years in a chest in her Oxford home.” - The Guardian

“It would be hard to find another nation as serious about its language. In Lithuania, one misspelled word can turn a politician into a clown; a misplaced comma can be enough to cancel a date. … Yet people often say, ‘If only that book/song/movie were in English, it would be a hit.’” - Literary...

The most common qualms, BISG reports involve “inadequate controls around the use of copyrighted material (86 percent), hallucinations (84 percent), AI-generated books flooding platforms (81 percent), and in accurate, false, or biased training data (79 percent). -Publishing Perspectives

“Drafted in the decade before To Kill a Mockingbird, after Lee had first moved to New York City in 1949, the stories feature some of the characters and settings she would soon make famous and reveal some of the contradictions and conflicts she would spend her life trying to resolve.” - The Guardian

Eight in ten listeners say the host is one of the main reasons they listen to their favorite show, and more than half would stop listening if the host left. - InsideRadio

By playing with metaphor, imagery and narrative, horror has always addressed hard truths about death, decay and the human condition that mainstream productions tend to shy away from as too disgusting, embarrassing or distressing. - The Guardian

Co-CEO Ted Sarandos told Wall Street analysts the company is excited “to leverage new technical capabilities as they come online” in advertising and product but also “content production.” Then he backtracked a bit: “We’re not chasing novelty for novelty’s sake. … It takes a great artist to make something great.” - The Hollywood Reporter

The acquisition reinforces consolidation trends across the creative sector, mirroring similar deals in music, film and television. Creative and cultural industries have a “tendency for bigness,” and this is certainly a big deal. - The Conversation

Palmer divides editors at her unnamed magazine into two categories: “the privileged (Workhorses) and the super-privileged (Show Horses).” Not since the 1980 publication of “The Official Preppy Handbook” has an author summed up an elite subset so deftly. - The New York Times

Approximately one billion-with-a-b was the figure reported when longtime Bond producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson decided to sell and basically retire from the 007 business. However, a recent earnings report for Wilson and Broccoli’s company Eon Productions revealed a purchase price which was nowhere close to ten figures. - Variety

“The plaintiff, Taína Lyons, an Afro-Latina dancer, … alleges that (Morris) told her that her hair was ‘too big’ and a ‘distraction.’ ... Ms. Lyons, who started at the company in 2022 and was terminated in 2024, claimed that she had faced discrimination based both on race and on disability.” - The New York...

The opera house issued a public appeal to the Riigikogu Cultural Affairs Committee on Thursday, stating that if the current lack of funding continues as it is, the sustainability of the national opera is in serious danger. - ERR (Estonia)

“Misty Copeland took one last spin on her pointe shoes Wednesday, showered with golden glitter and bouquets as she retired from American Ballet Theatre after a trailblazing career in which she became an ambassador for diversity in an overwhelmingly white art form.” - AP

“If all potential legal cases are to proceed against An Coimisiún Le Rincí Gaelacha, it may not be able to continue as a going concern ‘to govern our beautiful art form’. That is the warning sounded by directors of Irish dancing’s largest and oldest governing body.” - The Irish Times

“In a world with fewer contracts than aspiring dancers, and a long history of training dancers to silently acquiesce, it can feel taboo to express discomfort or refuse an opportunity. But artists sometimes have to contend with a role that seems culturally insensitive, exacerbates an injury, or otherwise feels wrong.” - Dance Magazine

Avoiding “wokeness,” as the conservative right defines it, may prove difficult. Ballet has long been shaped by refugees, people of color, and the queer community. - Washington City Paper

“Circus Centre Melbourne, originally designed as a home for Circus Oz, has reopened as a home for the broader contemporary circus and physical theatre sectors — a space where circus artists can meet, create, train and perform.” - ArtsHub (Australia)

“Today, the Globe is thriving as San Diego’s oldest and largest theater organization, offering performances … for more than 250,000 people a year. … We spoke with its leaders, present and past, about the company’s legacy, and some of the goals in mind for the theater’s centennial in 2035.” - The San Diego Union-Tribune...

AFM Local 802 announced that a deal with the Broadway League at 4:30 Thursday morning, saying in a statement that “this three-year agreement provides meaningful wage and health benefit increases.” - The Hollywood Reporter

“We unfortunately are operating with a little bit of fear, as we continue to be the prominent immigrant community theater company in Chicago, let alone in our neighborhood." - WBEZ

AFM Local 802 and the Broadway League (representing producers) go into mediation on Wednesday, and Local 802 is prepared to strike immediately if no deal is reached by Thursday morning. The League and Actors’ Equity negotiated an agreement last weekend, but Equity could still strike in solidarity with the musicians. - Playbill

No technological breakthrough will ever nullify the wisdom of these playwrights. The shadow of death sentences us to live in endless search of elusive meaning. But the introduction of artificial intelligence has given a new prism through which to view these unresolved existential questions. - Los Angeles Times (Yahoo!)

“The filmmaker announced he will auction off seven watches, ranging in value from $3,000 to $1 million, ...  in an effort to rebuild his wealth after investing $120 million into the 2024 box-office flop Megalopolis.” - San Francisco Chronicle (Yahoo!)

“In an era when sculptors were turning out factory-fabricated objects with shiny metal surfaces, … (she) stacked lengths of wood into objects that resembled pyramids, stairways and towers, imbuing the sleek forms of Minimalism with an aura of ancient mystery.” - The New York Times

With then-business partner Nicholas Grimshaw, he rode Britain’s “high-tech Modernism” wave of the 1970s to prominence. But he tired of that movement’s austere aesthetic and went on to design landmarks of London’s postmodern architecture such as the headquarters of TV-am and the intelligence service MI6. - The New York Times

Naghma, despite the popularity she achieved early in her career, faced many difficulties in conservative Afghan culture even before the rule of the Taliban. In the 1990s, mujahideen rebels murdered her sister and she fled the country. She’s been a cultural treasure for the Afghan diaspora ever since. - The New York Times

Loves: Baroque music, textiles “from all over the world,” real estate listings from across the world. Oh, and candy. "Am I not human?” - The New York Times

First of all, it was a surprise - to HBO. “It was very clear that they had been having meetings for Phase 1, and I had not been included in those meetings 'cause nobody thought I was going to be nominated for an Emmy.” (See the full interview here.) - NPR