Today’s AJ highlights: Wynton Marsalis has announced he will retire as the head of Jazz at Lincoln Center, ending a 40-year tenure that built the organization into a global powerhouse (The New York Times). The Kennedy Center continues its administrative chaos: its newly hired senior VP of artistic programming has resigned after just a few days, offering no explanation for the sudden exit (The Washington Post (MSN)). The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston announces layoffs of 6% of its workforce to address an “unsustainable deficit” (WBUR (Boston)) , and the Washington Post is described as undergoing an “existential meltdown” under its current CEO (Intelligencer (MSN)).
A major study commissioned by the BBC has urged the broadcaster to rethink “color-blind” casting, warning that audiences view it as “tokenism” and find the accompanying historical storylines “preachy” (Deadline). A revival of American Psycho is grappling with the fact that its protagonist, Patrick Bateman, has morphed from a satire of yuppie greed into a serious role model for the “Andrew Tate manosphere” (The Guardian).
The legal battle over AI has reached a level of discord. Universal Music, Concord, and ABKCO have filed a massive lawsuit against Anthropic, seeking $3 billion in damages for the alleged copyright infringement of over 20,000 song lyrics (Music Business Worldwide).
All the stories we collected today are below.
