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404 Media tracked a shipment of rare books to its final destination: an Amazon AI training facility, where the spines come off, the pages get scanned, and the originals don’t come back (404 Media). The trade is explicit now — the physical record converted into training weight, one direction only.
That’s not an isolated act of vandalism. A Missouri PBS station is suing to get back 70 years of its own archives, locked behind a dispute with the company storing them (Current). British booksellers are watching the used-book supply disappear into the same maw as their American counterparts (BBC). And our ability to find what’s left is degrading in parallel (The Walrus). Culture’s raw material is being consumed faster than we can keep track of what’s gone.
“Hand-designed” is now a selling point — and the label is already crowded with people who haven’t earned it (Fast Company). Provenance is becoming the product, but who verifies it is what it says?
Elsewhere: Mamdani is handing thousands of free Broadway tickets to New York high schoolers (Playbill), and Portland’s newest dance company skipped the theater entirely to perform for tens of thousands at the Moda Center (Oregon ArtsWatch). Access in action.
All of our stories below.