Good Morning,
Silicon Valley has discovered the theatre — not as a patron but as a training ground, with founders and engineers filing into improv classes to learn a skill that refuses to scale (The New York Times).
Listeners can’t reliably tell AI-made music from the human kind, and largely don’t care once they’re told (Washington Post).
Edinburgh’s Fringe sold 2.8 million tickets, back within sight of pre-pandemic numbers (Yahoo) — finally. AMC — an exhibitor, not a studio — is launching its own distribution company to get small films into theaters, having concluded it can’t wait for someone else to rebuild the middle (The Hollywood Reporter). And La Scala dropped the paywall on its streaming service entirely (Gramilano) — less generosity than a realization about where the value now sits.
Underneath it all, an essay on how gamification ate play (Aeon). Wendell Berry, who spent sixty years insisting some things shouldn’t be measured at all, died at 92 (AP).
And a writer on what tearing tickets taught her about beauty and changed her life (The Guardian).
All of our stories below.