Today’s Highlights: Pressure on cultural institutions is intensifying from two very different directions: political and criminal. In Washington, the stakes for the Smithsonian have escalated, with the White House threatening to withhold federal funding unless the institution submits (quickly) to a sweeping content review under a new executive order on “Restoring Truth and Sanity.”
The fallout from the recent Louvre heist has museums globally scrambling to secure their perimeters, realizing that the “gentleman thief” era is over and their current security models may be dangerously outdated.
Broadway may have hit a box office record in 2025, but the math no longer works; production costs have ballooned so high that even sold-out shows are struggling to break even. And in a darker look at the creative economy, we are being asked to confront an uncomfortable possibility: what if readers actually prefer AI-written books to the human version?
Finally, a strange intersection of music and science: it turns out that centuries of organ-tuning logbooks in British churches have inadvertently become a precise record of global warming.
All of today’s stories below:
