Good Morning,
Three reversals to start with. A federal judge ordered Trump’s name removed from the Kennedy Center and halted the planned two-year closure. The NYT Breaks down what’s next (The New York Times). Meanwhile, Trump’s “Freedom 250” celebration of the country’s birthday is unraveling so completely — nearly every musician has pulled out — that he now reportedly wants to cancel it (The New York Times). And Tennessee’s attempt to pull Roots from school libraries under its book-banning law has been blocked, for now (Salon).
Three obituaries today, each for a woman whose work built an institution without her name above the door. Claude Bessy ran the Paris Opera Ballet School for thirty years (The New York Times). Marcia Lucas co-edited the first Star Wars and Jedi and quietly rescued Spielberg and Scorsese films along the way (The Hollywood Reporter). And Hong Kong photographer Nancy Sheung portrayed women as autonomous and audacious in the 1960s, when the cultural script said otherwise (The New York Times).
Meanwhile, the AI corrosion file grows: Amazon is making an AI-animated Good Advice Cupcake without its creator (Wired), TikTok scammers are using AI blackface to push cheap junk (The Verge), and The Atlantic identifies the universal AI-writing tell: “perfectly clean, without a stray comma,,” (The Atlantic).
All of our stories below. See you tomorrow.
Doug
