Good Morning,
A federal judge has approved Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement with book authors — the largest copyright payout in U.S. history, about $3,000 per pirated title (AP). So the price of ingesting a book is now settled law. The price of flooding the market with fakes isn’t: Amazon is filling up with AI-written “biographies” credited to authors who don’t exist (The New York Times). Artnet’s critic reads it all as one story — synthetic culture as the third leg of America’s reality distortion field (Artnet).
Two consequential handovers: Oskar Eustis will leave New York’s Public Theater in 2028, among the last of the long-serving artistic directors who built the city’s nonprofit stages (The New York Times). And Dia’s Jessica Morgan — taking a pay cut to do it — will run Tate (The Guardian).
New York Magazine sorted Hollywood’s 100 most powerful directors into castes: “IP Guys,” “Middle-Class Auteurs,” “A24 Boys on the Rise” (Vulture). The org chart of an industry that swears that one doesn’t really exist.
All of our stories below.