AJ Four Ways: Text Only (by date) | headlines only
DANCE
IDEAS
- Good Morning
Three stories today about who controls the platform — and what happens when that control gets used to suppress, exploit, or monopolize. The BBC commissioned a documentary about health care in Gaza, the journalists spent months convincing their sources to trust the network, and then the BBC refused to broadcast it. The sources, it turns out, predicted this exactly (Reveal). Meanwhile, Amazon tried to sponsor Paris’s major book festival — the same Amazon accused of flooding its own marketplace with AI-generated titles propped up by fake reviews — and France’s booksellers were not having it. Amazon’s sponsorship was quietly “mutually agreed” to an end (The Guardian). And after years of DOJ pressure, Live Nation has settled its antitrust case: Ticketmaster will now be required to open parts of its platform to rival ticketing companies (Politico).
Glasgow, once one of Europe’s great arts cities, is losing venue after venue — and the young creatives who study there are asking why they’d stay (The Guardian (UK)). A familiar story, playing out in a city that used to be the exception.
On the more cheerful end: an opera singer whose career stalled started filming himself belting arias in a car lot, in his name tag, with custom lyrics about the vehicles. He’s now viral (Seattle Times). Timothée Chalamet, take note.
All of our stories below.
- The Argument Against Optimizing
What you lose in optimizing morality is the same thing you lose in maximizing your airline-mile spend. In other words, nothing quantifiable—but precisely the chance to escape quantification, to orient toward something that cannot be counted, predicted, analyzed. – The Point
- Amazon Pulls Sponsorship Of Paris Bookfair After Accusations Of Promoting AI Books
The SLF has been sharply critical of Amazon, arguing that it destabilises the book trade. In a statement reported by the Bookseller, it accused the company of seeking “to flood the market with fake AI-generated books, [which are] promoted by fake reviews, written by fake readers [and rise] to the top of fake rankings”. – The Guardian
- How Gen Z Is Hacking The High Cost Of Music Festivals
Enter Breakaway: a growing dance-music festival brand built on the premise of making concerts and festivals accessible and affordable again. – Fortune
- How Does The Troubled Philadelphia Museum Of Art Get Its Swing Back? Here Are 10 Ideas
The museum today is focused on the fact that fewer visitors are coming now than before the pandemic, and the concern is legitimate. But the way back can’t be merely quantitative. – Philadelphia Inquirer (MSN)
ISSUES
- How Does The Troubled Philadelphia Museum Of Art Get Its Swing Back? Here Are 10 Ideas
The museum today is focused on the fact that fewer visitors are coming now than before the pandemic, and the concern is legitimate. But the way back can’t be merely quantitative. – Philadelphia Inquirer (MSN)
- UK Museums Hold Hundreds Of Thousands Of Human Remains
An investigation by the Guardian found that UK museums hold more than 263,000 items of human remains from around the world, including whole skeletons, preserved bodies, such as Egyptian mummies, skulls, bones, skin, teeth, nails, scalps and hair. – The Guardian
- Preserving Church Architecture Isn’t Easy, Especially In An Era Of Digital Attendance
“Sometimes people think that churches have some kind of magic ATM machine that we go to and withdraw money. And the truth is that we do not.” – NPR
- The Women Of Kashmir, Struggling With Climate Change, Create Art In Order To Survive
“Afroza Bano’s hands, once calloused from planting and weaving reed mats, now grow nimble with needle and thread. But sometimes, they get pricked by sharp pins or roughened by handling coarse fabric.” – The Xylom
- The Giant Nude Woman In SF’s Embarcadero Plaza Will Be Staying All This Summer
“On Tuesday, March 4, commissioners voted to keep the temporary installation of ‘R-Evolution’ on display through October. The 48-foot-tall, steel-and-mesh figure of a naked woman by Petaluma artist Marco Cochrane was previously approved to be on view from mid-March 2025 to early March.” – San Francisco Chronicle (Yahoo!)
MEDIA
- The BBC Commissioned A Film About Health Care In Gaza, And Then Refused To Air It
“All these Palestinians told us that they thought the BBC would never run our film, and we really had to try and persuade them to talk to us because they didn’t and don’t trust the BBC.” The journalists were shocked to learn that the sources were correct. – Reveal
- The Performing Arts In The UK Aren’t Exactly Friendly To Working Parents
So says a new report, which “criticises the industry for failing to consider how it might adapt to better accommodate parents, with the result that many, in particular women, drop out.” – The Guardian (UK)
- How DOGE Used AI In An Attempt To Destroy The Humanities
DOGE employees used ChatGPT to make their choices. “The prompt was simple: ‘Does the following relate at all to D.E.I.? Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’’ The results were sweeping, and sometimes bizarre.” – The New York Times
- The Cosplayers Taking Emerald City Comic Con To Task For Its Deep Connections To ICE
“The problem lies in a rotten, corporate family tree,” and the self-described nerds aren’t going to let anyone forget it. For instance, in one panel, “it’ll be much, much more about fascism than a steamy book panel usually would be.” – The Stranger (Seattle)
- Grammarly Openly Steals The Work Of Writers Living And Dead
Gross: “Using Grammarly’s ‘Expert Review’ allows an approximation of Stephen King and Neil deGrasse Tyson to nitpick your work. While Tyson has the opportunity to say whether he’d like to be turned into a chatbot, other authors, like Carl Sagan, cannot because they are dead.” – AV Club
MUSIC
- Amazon Pulls Sponsorship Of Paris Bookfair After Accusations Of Promoting AI Books
The SLF has been sharply critical of Amazon, arguing that it destabilises the book trade. In a statement reported by the Bookseller, it accused the company of seeking “to flood the market with fake AI-generated books, [which are] promoted by fake reviews, written by fake readers [and rise] to the top of fake rankings”. – The Guardian
- The Best Way To Read 100 Books A Year
Sure, there’s “be rich” or “have your minions do everything in life for you except reading,” but there’s also this: Read physical books. – Slate
- The Privilege And Power Of Having A Writing Mentor
Ashley Ford needed “a reason to believe that giving myself over to a creative life didn’t also mean condemning myself to poverty and invisibility. What I needed was that constant source of air to turn my spark of creativity into a flame I could share with the world.” – Service 95
- Romance And Romantasy Fans Are Driving A Potential Literary Shift
- Amazon Tried To Sponsor A Book Festival In France, And That Went About As Well As You Might Expect
Many – most, even – of France’s booksellers pulled out of . Then the organizers got Amazon to “mutually agree” to end its sponsorship. Who thought this was a good idea in the first place? – The Guardian (UK)
PEOPLE
- Good Morning
Three stories today about who controls the platform — and what happens when that control gets used to suppress, exploit, or monopolize. The BBC commissioned a documentary about health care in Gaza, the journalists spent months convincing their sources to trust the network, and then the BBC refused to broadcast it. The sources, it turns out, predicted this exactly (Reveal). Meanwhile, Amazon tried to sponsor Paris’s major book festival — the same Amazon accused of flooding its own marketplace with AI-generated titles propped up by fake reviews — and France’s booksellers were not having it. Amazon’s sponsorship was quietly “mutually agreed” to an end (The Guardian). And after years of DOJ pressure, Live Nation has settled its antitrust case: Ticketmaster will now be required to open parts of its platform to rival ticketing companies (Politico).
Glasgow, once one of Europe’s great arts cities, is losing venue after venue — and the young creatives who study there are asking why they’d stay (The Guardian (UK)). A familiar story, playing out in a city that used to be the exception.
On the more cheerful end: an opera singer whose career stalled started filming himself belting arias in a car lot, in his name tag, with custom lyrics about the vehicles. He’s now viral (Seattle Times). Timothée Chalamet, take note.
All of our stories below.
- The Argument Against Optimizing
What you lose in optimizing morality is the same thing you lose in maximizing your airline-mile spend. In other words, nothing quantifiable—but precisely the chance to escape quantification, to orient toward something that cannot be counted, predicted, analyzed. – The Point
- Amazon Pulls Sponsorship Of Paris Bookfair After Accusations Of Promoting AI Books
The SLF has been sharply critical of Amazon, arguing that it destabilises the book trade. In a statement reported by the Bookseller, it accused the company of seeking “to flood the market with fake AI-generated books, [which are] promoted by fake reviews, written by fake readers [and rise] to the top of fake rankings”. – The Guardian
- How Gen Z Is Hacking The High Cost Of Music Festivals
Enter Breakaway: a growing dance-music festival brand built on the premise of making concerts and festivals accessible and affordable again. – Fortune
- How Does The Troubled Philadelphia Museum Of Art Get Its Swing Back? Here Are 10 Ideas
The museum today is focused on the fact that fewer visitors are coming now than before the pandemic, and the concern is legitimate. But the way back can’t be merely quantitative. – Philadelphia Inquirer (MSN)
PEOPLE
- Good Morning
Three stories today about who controls the platform — and what happens when that control gets used to suppress, exploit, or monopolize. The BBC commissioned a documentary about health care in Gaza, the journalists spent months convincing their sources to trust the network, and then the BBC refused to broadcast it. The sources, it turns out, predicted this exactly (Reveal). Meanwhile, Amazon tried to sponsor Paris’s major book festival — the same Amazon accused of flooding its own marketplace with AI-generated titles propped up by fake reviews — and France’s booksellers were not having it. Amazon’s sponsorship was quietly “mutually agreed” to an end (The Guardian). And after years of DOJ pressure, Live Nation has settled its antitrust case: Ticketmaster will now be required to open parts of its platform to rival ticketing companies (Politico).
Glasgow, once one of Europe’s great arts cities, is losing venue after venue — and the young creatives who study there are asking why they’d stay (The Guardian (UK)). A familiar story, playing out in a city that used to be the exception.
On the more cheerful end: an opera singer whose career stalled started filming himself belting arias in a car lot, in his name tag, with custom lyrics about the vehicles. He’s now viral (Seattle Times). Timothée Chalamet, take note.
All of our stories below.
- The Argument Against Optimizing
What you lose in optimizing morality is the same thing you lose in maximizing your airline-mile spend. In other words, nothing quantifiable—but precisely the chance to escape quantification, to orient toward something that cannot be counted, predicted, analyzed. – The Point
- Amazon Pulls Sponsorship Of Paris Bookfair After Accusations Of Promoting AI Books
The SLF has been sharply critical of Amazon, arguing that it destabilises the book trade. In a statement reported by the Bookseller, it accused the company of seeking “to flood the market with fake AI-generated books, [which are] promoted by fake reviews, written by fake readers [and rise] to the top of fake rankings”. – The Guardian
- How Gen Z Is Hacking The High Cost Of Music Festivals
Enter Breakaway: a growing dance-music festival brand built on the premise of making concerts and festivals accessible and affordable again. – Fortune
- How Does The Troubled Philadelphia Museum Of Art Get Its Swing Back? Here Are 10 Ideas
The museum today is focused on the fact that fewer visitors are coming now than before the pandemic, and the concern is legitimate. But the way back can’t be merely quantitative. – Philadelphia Inquirer (MSN)
THEATRE
VISUAL
- The Argument Against Optimizing
What you lose in optimizing morality is the same thing you lose in maximizing your airline-mile spend. In other words, nothing quantifiable—but precisely the chance to escape quantification, to orient toward something that cannot be counted, predicted, analyzed. – The Point
- Glasgow Used To Be An Arts Powerhouse, But It’s Losing So Many Arts Spaces
“Glasgow is slowly becoming a hollow shadow of the thriving, radical and creatively edgy place it once was. … If you’re a young creative person studying in Glasgow today, why would you stay here after graduation?” – The Guardian (UK)
- For Dublin’s Arts Council, Meetings With Property Developers Are Always On The Schedule
“Our job is to ‘opportunity-make’ a space.’ … A lot of people think cultural development shouldn’t exist. There should be housing development, factory development and office development. But culture? What is that?” – Irish Times
- Whether He Had A Point Or Not, Opera (And Ballet) Are Clapping Back At Chalamet
The Seattle Opera offered a deal on tickets to Carmen using the code Timothee, and LA Opera “posted a photo from the opera Akhnaten … with the caption ‘Sorry, @tchalamet. We’d offer you complimentary tickets to Akhnaten, but it’s selling out.’” – NBC
- Why Are Twins Or Doppelgangers Everywhere Right Now?
“From spyware as standard to the conspiracy theorists who insist that Melania Trump has been replaced by an impersonator, we are in a deeply paranoid moment. Fittingly, the figure of the doppelganger stalks right across contemporary culture, through books, fashion and film.” – The Guardian (UK)
