AJ Four Ways: Text Only (by date) | headlines only
DANCE
IDEAS
- Dealing With Sudden Pop Fame By Exiting The Game Almost Entirely
Kim Petras was not happy with her experience of “what can happen when the general corporate powers that be force you to sideline your artistry for the company line.” So, she left. – The Fader
- A Photographer Who Portrayed Women As Bold And Self-Possessed, Even In 1960s Hong Kong
Sheung was “deeply invested in crafting an image of female autonomy and audacity at a time when women’s lives were constrained by traditional expectations.” – The New York Times
- Museum Gift Stores Have Always Been A Little Special, But They’ve Leveled Up
“Rather than an exit point, this new wave of merchandising is quickly turning museum gift shops into a desirable entry point. Curated edits … are now beginning to treat them as a stand-alone shopping destination, marking a shift from cultural institution to cultural retailer.” – The Guardian (UK)
- The Five Top Takeaways From The Kennedy Center Ruling
And yes, we sure do mean the Kennedy Center. – The New York Times
- The Creator Of This Animated Cupcake Is Furious At Buzzfeed’s GenAI Plan
Remember when Jonah Peretti of Buzzfeed seemed like a good guy? That was a long time ago, and we were all so much more innocent, including the creator of Good Advice Cupcake: “I trusted them, though naively, when they said they had no interest in continuing Cuppy without me.” – Wired
ISSUES
- Museum Gift Stores Have Always Been A Little Special, But They’ve Leveled Up
“Rather than an exit point, this new wave of merchandising is quickly turning museum gift shops into a desirable entry point. Curated edits … are now beginning to treat them as a stand-alone shopping destination, marking a shift from cultural institution to cultural retailer.” – The Guardian (UK)
- The Serious Business Of Creating Illustrations For Children
“For years, illustrators have been overlooked, seen as people who come in and do the decorating after the house has been built. But this couldn’t be further from the truth.” – The Guardian (UK)
- The Art Looter Who Supplied Museums
Latchford’s success depended not just on criminal networks that supplied and transported these objects, but on the willingness of museums, dealers, collectors, and scholars to accept fragmented or problematic provenance so long as the objects themselves retained the aura of rarity and beauty. – Hyperallergic
- Gehry Partners Will Work On Renovation Of The Getty Center
Gehry Partners will design a variety of upgrades to the Getty Center — including a major revamp of its entry experience — during its upcoming year-long closure, the museum announced Thursday. – Los Angeles Times
- ARTnews Lists “The 100 Best Artworks About America”
“What, exactly, defines America? It’s a question that’s been asked for more than two centuries, and it’s unlikely to be conclusively answered anytime soon. But, with the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding fast approaching, we took the occasion to hash out a response to that query, using art as a guide.” – ARTnews
MEDIA
- The Five Top Takeaways From The Kennedy Center Ruling
And yes, we sure do mean the Kennedy Center. – The New York Times
- The Creator Of This Animated Cupcake Is Furious At Buzzfeed’s GenAI Plan
Remember when Jonah Peretti of Buzzfeed seemed like a good guy? That was a long time ago, and we were all so much more innocent, including the creator of Good Advice Cupcake: “I trusted them, though naively, when they said they had no interest in continuing Cuppy without me.” – Wired
- On TikTok, Scammers Are Using AI Blackface To Push Cheap Products
Those belt buckles sure aren’t handmade. And: “Nearly all aspects of the accounts appear to be AI-generated — from the ‘person’ in the video to automated responses to comments, which in some cases attempt to mimic African American vernacular.” – The Verge
- Federal Judge Orders Trump To Take His Name Off The Kennedy Center
A federal judge Friday ordered that President Donald Trump’s name be removed from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and that officials halt its plan to close the venue for two years. – Washington Post
- Universities Rethink The SAT
“We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics, and other quantitatively demanding fields,” the professors write in an open letter to the Board of Regents. – The Wall Street Journal
MUSIC
- A Novel Twenty Years In The Making
“If you work on a book for twenty years—whatever we mean by work—people really act like you’re very neurotic. Like there’s something wrong with you, or you’re doing something wrong—and it’s easy to internalize that.” – Paris Review
- English Can Be A Weird Language. That’s Why It’s Perfect For Competitive Spelling Bees.
Sure, there are some other languages whose speakers have spelling contests, but there are plenty — Italian, Finnish, Malay, etc. — whose words are spelled exactly as they’re pronounced. But English? In what other language could “ough” be pronounced eight different ways, depending on the word? – The New York Times Magazine
- The Publishing Industry Is Very Vulnerable To AI
The book-publishing industry had already been wrestling with the prospect of a flood of AI-authored texts in the fiction market, and now the Rosenbaum scandal was showing the way AI could blow a hole in the nonfiction sector, too. – New York Magazine
- Spotify Has Become A Huge Player In Audiobooks
Spotify announced that the total number of hours of audiobooks listened to on the service are up 60% year-over-year, with one million people having paid for Audiobooks+, an add-on launched last year that allows listeners to unlock additional hours of audiobooks on top of those already included with its premium service. – Publishers Weekly
- Libraries Plead With Big Five Publishers To Rethink E-Book Pricing
“Five public library organizations from the U.S. and Canada … (are urging) publishers to negotiate usage-based e-book lending models as well as perpetual-use options.” The director of one of the organizations warned that e-book costs have “become unsustainable, and for many small libraries, impossible.” – Publishers Weekly
PEOPLE
- Dealing With Sudden Pop Fame By Exiting The Game Almost Entirely
Kim Petras was not happy with her experience of “what can happen when the general corporate powers that be force you to sideline your artistry for the company line.” So, she left. – The Fader
- A Photographer Who Portrayed Women As Bold And Self-Possessed, Even In 1960s Hong Kong
Sheung was “deeply invested in crafting an image of female autonomy and audacity at a time when women’s lives were constrained by traditional expectations.” – The New York Times
- Museum Gift Stores Have Always Been A Little Special, But They’ve Leveled Up
“Rather than an exit point, this new wave of merchandising is quickly turning museum gift shops into a desirable entry point. Curated edits … are now beginning to treat them as a stand-alone shopping destination, marking a shift from cultural institution to cultural retailer.” – The Guardian (UK)
- The Five Top Takeaways From The Kennedy Center Ruling
And yes, we sure do mean the Kennedy Center. – The New York Times
- The Creator Of This Animated Cupcake Is Furious At Buzzfeed’s GenAI Plan
Remember when Jonah Peretti of Buzzfeed seemed like a good guy? That was a long time ago, and we were all so much more innocent, including the creator of Good Advice Cupcake: “I trusted them, though naively, when they said they had no interest in continuing Cuppy without me.” – Wired
PEOPLE
- Dealing With Sudden Pop Fame By Exiting The Game Almost Entirely
Kim Petras was not happy with her experience of “what can happen when the general corporate powers that be force you to sideline your artistry for the company line.” So, she left. – The Fader
- A Photographer Who Portrayed Women As Bold And Self-Possessed, Even In 1960s Hong Kong
Sheung was “deeply invested in crafting an image of female autonomy and audacity at a time when women’s lives were constrained by traditional expectations.” – The New York Times
- Museum Gift Stores Have Always Been A Little Special, But They’ve Leveled Up
“Rather than an exit point, this new wave of merchandising is quickly turning museum gift shops into a desirable entry point. Curated edits … are now beginning to treat them as a stand-alone shopping destination, marking a shift from cultural institution to cultural retailer.” – The Guardian (UK)
- The Five Top Takeaways From The Kennedy Center Ruling
And yes, we sure do mean the Kennedy Center. – The New York Times
- The Creator Of This Animated Cupcake Is Furious At Buzzfeed’s GenAI Plan
Remember when Jonah Peretti of Buzzfeed seemed like a good guy? That was a long time ago, and we were all so much more innocent, including the creator of Good Advice Cupcake: “I trusted them, though naively, when they said they had no interest in continuing Cuppy without me.” – Wired
THEATRE
VISUAL
- The Biggest AI Writing Tell
The prose – whether in a text or fiction submission – is “perfectly clean, without a stray comma; uniform in length, with evenly paced paragraphs and a distinctive tone that is simultaneously breezy and grandiose.” – The Atlantic
- Looking At 100s Of Thousands Of College Essays: AI Flattens Creativity
This seems to be especially true for students. A.I.’s smooth sentences, elegant transitions and rich vocabulary give the illusion of expansive creativity and individuality. But the underlying ideas often converge into a few homogenized categories. – The New York Times
- The Special Kind Of Knowledge That Can’t Be Taught
It’s not the kind of knowledge that you gain from reading a textbook or listening to a lecture, nor is it the kind of knowledge that subjects report when they try to describe their experiences to others. It can’t be expressed in natural language – at least, not fully. – Psyche
- AI Is Homogenizing Our Writing And Our Thinking
Yes, we are standing to sound like LLMs in our writings. This may not be as bad if this was just restricted to how people write. This is now also impacting how people think! – 3 Quarks Daily
- Eyewitness Memory Is Unreliable. Or Is It?
The science of memory has been shifting. A re-evaluation of real-world criminal cases and laboratory experiments suggests that an eyewitness’s confidence in a specific memory can be a strong indicator of the veracity of their account, at least in certain circumstances. – Nature
