Today’s AJ highlights: The occupation of Minneapolis continues but signs of resistance mount. Philadelphia is suing the Trump administration after federal workers removed a memorial to the enslaved people of George Washington’s household from Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, leaving only their names engraved on a wall (Bucks County Beacon). This act of erasure resonates with Salman Rushdie’s warnings from Sundance, where he argued that “for the authoritarian, culture is the enemy” because it represents the complexity that tyranny seeks to destroy (The Guardian).
In the digital realm, the resistance to “synthetic” culture is getting creative. An art student in Alaska explains why he ate a banana-taped-to-wall style AI artwork in protest, calling the machine-generated piece “insulting” to human effort (The Nation). Meanwhile, Wikipedia editors are cataloging the “tells” of AI writing to purge it from the encyclopedia (Ars Technica) , and critics are lamenting the descent of literary coverage into “book slop”—vacuous, list-based content designed for algorithms rather than readers (The Baffler).
Finally, stories about the infrastructure of the arts. The UK has announced a massive £1.5 billion investment to stabilize its cultural sector after years of austerity (The Conversation) , while Portland faces a difficult choice between renovating its seismically unsafe Keller Auditorium or building a new venue, with studies suggesting the city can’t support both (Oregon ArtsWatch). And in a twist of internet fate, Gary Larson’s The Far Side is enjoying a resurgence, driven by viral videos of cows using tools (NPR).
All of the stories we collected below:
