AJ Four Ways: Text Only (by date) | headlines only
DANCE
IDEAS
- Check Out Some Of History’s Great Literary Forgers And Fraudsters
There’s the guy who wrote a love letter to Anne Hathaway and some poems and passed them off as Shakespeare. The guy who faked documents and Teddy Roosevelt, Alexander Graham Bell, and Amelia Earhart. An entire rogues’ gallery of Abraham Lincoln forgers. And, of course, the epics of “Ossian.” – Literary Hub
- On Social Media, Disasters Are Now Merely Consumable Content
Like every major platform in 2025, X has become more like TikTok, prioritizing recommended content from accounts from people users follow. You can still follow people on X, but its new influencer economy demands viral engagement, and viral engagement comes through the For You page and especially video. – Intelligencer (MSN)
- World’s Top Street Dance Competition Comes To Arab World For First Time
“Rhythmic beats echoed through the Tunis Opera Theatre stage as dancers faced off at the first-ever edition in the Arab world of a street dance tournament originating in Paris. This year’s Juste Debout is hosted in eight cities including London, New York, Beijing and Tokyo, as well as the Tunisian capital.” – AFP (Barron’s)
- Small Study: Readers Don’t Seem To Care If Writing Was Created By AI
“Throughout the study, writers expressed concerns about audiences’ reactions to their use of AI assistance for their writing,” the authors note. However, the survey results indicate readers didn’t find that much difference in the writing samples. – ZDNet
- Criticize Artists For Promoting After the LA Fires? I Don’t Think So!
“The Oscars are a big show that will be seen by millions of people and will bring national attention to Los Angeles. That can be made to be very useful, and it’s worth thinking clearly about how to do that.” – San Francisco Chronicle (MSN)
ISSUES
- Getty Museums In L.A. Now Seen As “Beacon Of Fire Preparedness”
“The Center, which houses a sprawling collection in a modernist building, is described on the Getty website as a ‘marvel of anti-fire engineering.’ The Villa, which focuses on ancient Greek and Roman art, has a well-tuned anti-fire protocol that kept it intact amid the devastation (in) Pacific Palisades.” – The Washington Post (MSN)
- Google “Cubism” These Days And You’ll Get A Bunch Of AI-Generated Garbage
Same with Bing and DuckDuckGo; the bogus AI images are crowding out Picasso and Braque in the results. The stuff comes from CubismArtwork.com, which also features bot-written artist bios and how-to-paint-cubism-yourself instructions and (because of course it does) sells wall posters of AI-generated faux-Cubist art. – Artnet
- Christie’s Picks A New Leader
Bonnie Brennan, a 51-year-old Michigan native, succeeds Guillaume Cerutti, a 58-year-old Frenchman who is stepping down after an eight-year run. Cerutti plans to continue as the house’s board chairman. – The Wall Street Journal (MSN)
- Italian Museums Try Offering Free Dog-Sitting Services For Visitors
“Normally, a paid version of the service operates at 290 museums across Italy. One of the company Bauadvisor’s dog-sitters meets the owner outside the museum and takes the dog for a walk. … This promotional, free version of the service will take place for one day every month … in a different Italian city.” – CNN
- How Virtual Reality Is Changing The Designing Of Buildings
VR brings clarity to architectural design. While traditional blueprints and 3D renderings can mainly convey spatial relationships, lighting conditions and material finishes, VR immerses users in a realistic simulation of the space. – The Conversation
MEDIA
- Criticize Artists For Promoting After the LA Fires? I Don’t Think So!
“The Oscars are a big show that will be seen by millions of people and will bring national attention to Los Angeles. That can be made to be very useful, and it’s worth thinking clearly about how to do that.” – San Francisco Chronicle (MSN)
- Bankrupt University Of The Arts Building Is Sold At Auction — To Curtis Institute
The renowned music school outbid Temple University for the former Arts Alliance building, very near Curtis’s home on Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, after an interested real estate developer dropped out. The final auction price was $7.5 million. – The Philadelphia Inquirer (MSN)
- Bay Area Arts Organizations In Funding Crisis
Similarly in San Francisco, hundreds of music and theater organizations (the latter in major decline recently) are struggling to survive despite the well-established fact that they have a beneficial economic impact on the city and the Bay Area. – San Francisco Classical Voice
- Criticism Is So Much More Than Being Critical
Criticism can oppose; it can also cajole, provoke, consider, inform, and suggest. More than being punitive or dismissive, public criticism can provide an opportunity to collectively look at a thing differently, and writing such a piece can be a collaborative venture. It can also be interrogative. – Hyperallergic
- Artists Tried Influencing The Election With Billboards. Did They Sway Anyone?
How do you evaluate something as subjective and mercurial as billboard art? – The New York Times
MUSIC
- Check Out Some Of History’s Great Literary Forgers And Fraudsters
There’s the guy who wrote a love letter to Anne Hathaway and some poems and passed them off as Shakespeare. The guy who faked documents and Teddy Roosevelt, Alexander Graham Bell, and Amelia Earhart. An entire rogues’ gallery of Abraham Lincoln forgers. And, of course, the epics of “Ossian.” – Literary Hub
- Small Study: Readers Don’t Seem To Care If Writing Was Created By AI
“Throughout the study, writers expressed concerns about audiences’ reactions to their use of AI assistance for their writing,” the authors note. However, the survey results indicate readers didn’t find that much difference in the writing samples. – ZDNet
- How De-Gendering Language Works
“She’s an actor” simply phases out “actress” and sends it on its way, along with Studebakers, Koogle peanut butter and Red Skelton. It creates no new word poised to inherit the potentially dismissive air that “actress” implied. – The New York Times
- The Art Of Amazon Reviews
He embraced all the stylistic quirks, choppy sentence fragments and run-ons, either darting from point to point like a distracted squirrel or leaning heavily into declarative statements. His voice is overly casual, conversational. – Cleveland Review of Books
- Critics Have Always Hated/Loved/Worried-About Newspapers. Let’s Understand The History
The abolition of most forms of censorship, declining paper costs, railway expansion and universal primary education triggered a newspaper boom that saw total daily circulation rise from around 1.5 million in 1870 to nearly 10 million by 1914. – Aeon
PEOPLE
- Check Out Some Of History’s Great Literary Forgers And Fraudsters
There’s the guy who wrote a love letter to Anne Hathaway and some poems and passed them off as Shakespeare. The guy who faked documents and Teddy Roosevelt, Alexander Graham Bell, and Amelia Earhart. An entire rogues’ gallery of Abraham Lincoln forgers. And, of course, the epics of “Ossian.” – Literary Hub
- On Social Media, Disasters Are Now Merely Consumable Content
Like every major platform in 2025, X has become more like TikTok, prioritizing recommended content from accounts from people users follow. You can still follow people on X, but its new influencer economy demands viral engagement, and viral engagement comes through the For You page and especially video. – Intelligencer (MSN)
- World’s Top Street Dance Competition Comes To Arab World For First Time
“Rhythmic beats echoed through the Tunis Opera Theatre stage as dancers faced off at the first-ever edition in the Arab world of a street dance tournament originating in Paris. This year’s Juste Debout is hosted in eight cities including London, New York, Beijing and Tokyo, as well as the Tunisian capital.” – AFP (Barron’s)
- Small Study: Readers Don’t Seem To Care If Writing Was Created By AI
“Throughout the study, writers expressed concerns about audiences’ reactions to their use of AI assistance for their writing,” the authors note. However, the survey results indicate readers didn’t find that much difference in the writing samples. – ZDNet
- Criticize Artists For Promoting After the LA Fires? I Don’t Think So!
“The Oscars are a big show that will be seen by millions of people and will bring national attention to Los Angeles. That can be made to be very useful, and it’s worth thinking clearly about how to do that.” – San Francisco Chronicle (MSN)
PEOPLE
- Check Out Some Of History’s Great Literary Forgers And Fraudsters
There’s the guy who wrote a love letter to Anne Hathaway and some poems and passed them off as Shakespeare. The guy who faked documents and Teddy Roosevelt, Alexander Graham Bell, and Amelia Earhart. An entire rogues’ gallery of Abraham Lincoln forgers. And, of course, the epics of “Ossian.” – Literary Hub
- On Social Media, Disasters Are Now Merely Consumable Content
Like every major platform in 2025, X has become more like TikTok, prioritizing recommended content from accounts from people users follow. You can still follow people on X, but its new influencer economy demands viral engagement, and viral engagement comes through the For You page and especially video. – Intelligencer (MSN)
- World’s Top Street Dance Competition Comes To Arab World For First Time
“Rhythmic beats echoed through the Tunis Opera Theatre stage as dancers faced off at the first-ever edition in the Arab world of a street dance tournament originating in Paris. This year’s Juste Debout is hosted in eight cities including London, New York, Beijing and Tokyo, as well as the Tunisian capital.” – AFP (Barron’s)
- Small Study: Readers Don’t Seem To Care If Writing Was Created By AI
“Throughout the study, writers expressed concerns about audiences’ reactions to their use of AI assistance for their writing,” the authors note. However, the survey results indicate readers didn’t find that much difference in the writing samples. – ZDNet
- Criticize Artists For Promoting After the LA Fires? I Don’t Think So!
“The Oscars are a big show that will be seen by millions of people and will bring national attention to Los Angeles. That can be made to be very useful, and it’s worth thinking clearly about how to do that.” – San Francisco Chronicle (MSN)
THEATRE
VISUAL
- On Social Media, Disasters Are Now Merely Consumable Content
Like every major platform in 2025, X has become more like TikTok, prioritizing recommended content from accounts from people users follow. You can still follow people on X, but its new influencer economy demands viral engagement, and viral engagement comes through the For You page and especially video. – Intelligencer (MSN)
- The Death Of DEI
For a large swath of the country, the idea of DEI has become a catchall insult. DEI is part bogeyman, part always-there scapegoat for some combination of bureaucracy, overreach, or mediocrity. – The Atlantic
- Studying How The Brain Works Is Fine. But What About Imagination?
Imagination of a sort is central to all experience. We construct our perceived world from incomplete information, interpreted via inner representations of our environment, that generate predictions of what is actually out there and how it will respond to our actions. – The Guardian
- The Rise And Fall Of Greenwich Village’s Bohemia
The unique conditions of the Village produced an environment in which genius could make sense of itself and wheat could be separated from chaff. The mid-century Village was a layered, organic, seething society: multiethnic, multigenerational, transclass, ideologically open and experimental. – First Things
- Why Do Some People Seek Self-Insight More Than Others?
My colleagues and I have been looking into what we call the ‘self-insight motive’ and we’ve found it might be more accurate to see it as akin to a personality trait that varies in strength between individuals – some people have more of it than other. – Psyche