We apologize for the drip drip drip of bad news from the Kennedy Center, but here’s a good explainer of the toxic Ric Grenell reign. Trump just decided Grenell was generating too much heat doing making changes (The Atlantic). Separately, Democratic senators are pressing the GSA about what happens to the artwork inside 46 federal buildings tagged for “accelerated disposal” — among them, Philip Guston murals that could simply disappear with the sale (ARTnews).
The AI copyright fights kept moving. Britannica — which owns Merriam-Webster — is suing OpenAI for scraping roughly 100,000 articles without permission (TechCrunch). Grammarly, caught using writers’ and teachers’ names as fake “experts,” apologized — and it turns out was also facing a lawsuit (Futurism). Humanities scholars meanwhile are calling AI an existential threat to higher education itself (The Guardian).
Peninsula Ballet Theatre — 59 years old, rooted in San Mateo County — is closing (San Francisco Chronicle). And at the Vatican, a restorer removing a forgery found an El Greco underneath it, in the papal apartments (Artnet). The painting had been hiding there since roughly 1590.
All of our stories below.
