A dramatic administrative collapse at the Washington Post, where CEO Will Lewis has abruptly stepped down just days after gutting the paper’s staff. The union’s verdict is that his legacy is the “attempted destruction” of a great institution. While the Kennedy Center remains dark and its orchestra scouts for a life-raft, the Philadelphia Museum of Art finds clarity, reversing a rebrand widely considered “disastrous.”
Anthropic has been scanning and then pulping hundreds of thousands of paper books to feed its AI—a “red flag” for employees who realized the company was literally performing the dystopia its critics feared. Turns out that Waymo’s “self-driving” cars aren’t so “self” at all, frequently being piloted by human workers in the Philippines.
From the Milan Olympics opening ceremony—where contemporary dancers engaged in “thrilling” dance-offs—to the Super Bowl halftime show, where the stage must be assembled and vanished in eight minutes, we are prioritizing the transient over the permanent. This shift toward the ephemeral is perhaps why the loss of the permanent—like Woodie King Jr.’s legacy in Black theatre or an artist’s fragmented and lost archive—feels so particularly final.
All of today’s stories below:
