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- Grandparents Are Giving Their Grandkids Personalized AI-Slop Children’s Books, Driving Parents Nuts
“If the odds are against parents who disapprove of artificial intelligence, it’s because there’s an entire ecosystem of AI services designed to insert real children into books … and some relatives can’t resist their ads for specially curated storybooks.” – Wired
- In Federal Trial Of Salman Rushdie’s Attacker, Defense Rests Without Presenting Testimony
As happened in defendant Hadi Matar’s New York state trial for attempted murder (for which he was convicted in February 2025), he declined to testify himself and his attorney called no witnesses. – AP
- Why Are University Administrators Trying To Get Academics To Get Rid Of Books?
The bureaucrat sent an email to him with a dread warning. The books must go, it decreed. There was nothing healthy nor wise in the practice, for the keeping of books on bookshelves is now “the unnecessary storing of combustible materials.” – The Critic
- Out, Damned Bot: How The Bots Took Over Our Lives
This strategy of manufacturing a froth of interest around a given subject, from Nicki Minaj’s political perspectives to Sydney Sweeney’s jean ads, has recently been especially effective, and has moved culture-war fights from the trenches of bot-infested social networks into more mainstream channels. – The New Yorker
- What Cinema Is Becoming
In this new media landscape, the rigid divides between pure cinema and genre cinema collapsed. Show business no longer creates value solely by selling a single commodity. Instead, it thrives on building interconnected “media ecologies,” creatively connecting film production with TV, toys, games, tourism, platforms, brands, live events, local practices and new technologies. – The Conversation
- Tulsa Ballet’s Artistic Directors Are Retiring After 30 Years
Artistic director Marcello Angelini and assistant artistic director Daniela Buson (who are married) announced they will retire from their positions at the end of the 2026-27 season, the company’s 70th. Among the couple’s crowning achievements is this spring’s tour to London, for which the company received glowing reviews. – Tulsa Flyer
- The Depressing Notion Of AI Art
The point is that art is linked to dialectical movement. In most societies at most points in time, art is decoration or religious offering — the lyric is also possible. But to actually have artistic evolution, you really need a movement of historical forces that art, essentially, is keeping pace with. – Castalia
- The Bullshit Jobs We Do To Make Possible Our Real Work
“Utilizing a bullshit job to pursue other projects isn’t easy. It requires judgment and determination to take time that’s been first flattened and homogenized … then broken randomly into unpredictably large fragments.” – Arrowsmith Press
- New York State Museum Accused Of Fraud
Federal investigators said high-ranking administrators at the New York State Museum in Albany directed a subordinate to falsify time sheets, allowing the state to improperly draw down $597,624 in federal grants from 2020 to 2022. – The New York Times
- Early Music Pioneer Joel Cohen, Founder Of Boston Camerata, Has Died At 84
He founded the Camerata in 1968 and directed it for 40 years, performing and recording (on over 50 discs) a repertoire ranging from 12th-century troubadour sings through large-scale French Baroque sacred works to 19th-century American spirituals and Shaker songs. He retired in 2008, succeeded by his wife, soprano Anne Azéma. – That Eric Alper
- Italian Theatres, Mt. Olympus Added As World Heritage Sites
Meeting in Busan, South Korea, for its 48th session from July 19 to 29, UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee inscribed 19 cultural sites, five natural environments, and one property exhibiting both cultural and ecological significance. – Artnet
- Musicians Union Files Suit Against AI Music Companies And Universal And Warner To Block Licensing
The union alleges that Universal and Warner licensed recordings made by its members to the two AI companies “without compensation or credit.” – MusicBusinessWorldwide
- Why Writing Feels So Difficult
Every time you sit down to write, you’re doing something your brain registers as socially risky. Translating private thoughts into language means exposing yourself to judgment and for most of human history, judgment wasn’t just uncomfortable, it was dangerous. – LitHub
- Tobias Picker’s New Opera Is About A Trans Pioneer, Who’s Played By A Pioneering Trans Opera Singer
Lili Elbe, which gets its US premiere this weekend at Santa Fe Opera, is based on the trans woman whose story was told in the film The Danish Girl. Picker wrote the title role for baritone Lucia Lucas, the first active opera singer to come out as trans. – The New York Times
- Group Which Founded Golden Globes Sues Company Which Bought It
“Members of the Hollywood Foreign Press, which founded and for decades owned the Golden Globe Awards, have sued Penske Media Corporation and others, alleging they engaged in fraud to acquire the valuable awards show in an attempt to create an entertainment industry monopoly.” – AP
- Two Of Dallas’s Largest Performing Arts Institutions Are Merging
The AT&T Performing Arts Center — which includes the Winspear Opera House, Wyly Theatre, Annette Strauss Square, and Sammons Park — and one of its five resident companies, Dallas Theater Center, plan to combine administration and many operations, with DTC becoming ATTPAC’s producing arm. – KERA (Dallas)
- At The Open Auditions For Off-Broadway’s “Spring Awakening” Revival
“These aspirants arrived by plane, by bus, by subway, in braids and vests and milkmaid dresses, clutching headshots and binders and gigantic water bottles. … A few dozen joined the line before dawn. By noon, more than a thousand sat and stood and swayed.” – The New York Times
- Filmmaker Mike Leigh Says His New Film Is His Last
The 83-year-old director — one of the few to have won the top prize at both Cannes (Secrets and Lies) and Venice (Vera Drake) — has the autoimmune disorder myositis and says he’s physically unable to make another movie after Tender Loving Care, to be released this fall. – IndieWire
- Interlochen Center Issues Report On History Of Sexual Misconduct By Faculty
“The 97-page report spells out some 70 instances of sexual misconduct by multiple former faculty and staff spanning seven decades. … None of the 47 people accused in the report is currently employed by Interlochen. And owing to the amount of time that has passed, about a third of those accused are now dead.” – Interlochen Public Radio
- Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, One Of Frank Gehry’s Last Buildings, Finally Has An Opening Date
“After a slew of delays and controversies, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi has finally narrowed down its big debut to a single day: December 11. The winter inauguration keeps the museum (just about) on track to open in 2026, as previously promised, but arrives two decades after the mammoth museum project was first announced in 2006.” – Artnet
- Institutions reinventing themselves
Good Morning,
Several stories today about institutions discovering they don’t actually need a center. Alabama’s WLRH dropped NPR programming and its audience grew (AL.com); public media more broadly is finding that losing federal money surfaced a donor base it had assumed was tapped out (Current). Neither result makes the cuts a good idea, but still. Makes you think…
Rethinking the model shows up in Australia too, where four regional performing arts centers have pooled resources to originate the big work the capital-city companies used to (Limelight). In Buffalo, the AKG has split its director job in two (BTPM) — an admission that the singular-visionary model maybe should be rethought.
A terrific essay asks why “ancient history” still means Greece and Rome (Aeon).
And today’s saddest stories: the Kennedy Center is empty enough that the volunteer tour guide is now the story (NYT). And Betye Saar, who spent 70 years making art from what the culture threw away, has died four days short of 100 (Yahoo).
Lighter: Emily Wilson has seen Nolan’s Odyssey and would like a word (London Review of Books).
- A Chagall Etching Is Liberated After Languishing For 20 Years In Customs
The etching, L’Acrobate au violon (1924), and another work were confiscated from a shipment of art being taken from France to Switzerland in 2005 after French agents determined that the items weren’t authorized to leave the country. The pieces were rediscovered after two decades, and the Chagall is now on display in Besançon. – Artnet
- The Ancient World Beyond Greece, Rome and Egypt
The de facto equation of ‘ancient history’ with ancient Mediterranean history, at least in most of the Anglosphere, has endured for many generations. But we are on the cusp of a dramatic shift in perspective that is producing a much bigger, broader and more exciting view of ‘the ancient world’. – Aeon
- Meet The Costumer Who Paints New York City Ballet’s Pointe Shoes
“To be a shoe colorist for New York City Ballet, as Tim Foster has been for 15 years, is to occupy a small yet important niche. Most pointe shoes and ballet slippers are manufactured in a pale pink. But the company’s repertoire requires a rainbow of hues.” – The New York Times
- They’re Still Making New Discoveries At Pompeii
- Performing Arts Centers In Australia’s “Second Cities” Form A Network
Four of Australia’s leading regional performing arts organisations have joined forces to establish a new national pathway for developing and presenting large-scale Australian theatre, backed by funding from Creative Australia. – Limelight
- The Artist Helping Trump Remake How Washington DC Looks
Unlike other culture czars for the administration who have quickly come and gone, Mr. Taylor has an artistic background that makes him a distinct and persistent champion of the president’s vision. – The New York Times
- The Amazon’s Two Historic Opera Houses Get UNESCO World Heritage Status
The venues — Teatro Amazonas in Manaus, the port in the central Amazon basin, and Theatro da Paz (sic) in Belem, the port at the mouth of the river — date from the late 19th-century rubber boom, which made those cities wealthy enough (for a while) to bring in major artists from Europe. – DPA (Yahoo!)
- Huntsville Public Radio Dropped NPR Programming — Here’s What Happened
Its listenership has grown since the change. WLRH is ranked as the No. 4 most listened-to station on its most recent Nielsen report, according to Brukner. It usually ranks around No. 10. – Alabama.com
- Maybe Losing Federal Funding Ended Up Being An Opportunity For Public Media?
After the federal funding loss, the industry saw that it hadn’t plateaued but instead “found a whole new level of support,” Chinn said. Stations saw record giving, with some even raising enough to cover the loss of federal funding. – Current
- Why Did Paramount Agree To Delay Its Warner Deal?
With a $7 million-per-day ticking fee that kicks in starting Oct. 1 — which would cost Paramount $650 million a quarter — why would Paramount agree to such a delay? The key lies in the nine words preceding the June 1 target date: “until five days after the outcome in a trial.” – The Wrap (MSN)
- Sure, We’ve Canceled A Bunch Of Previews, But Our “Game Of Thrones” Play Is Just Fine, Says RSC
“Ticketholders for five preview performances of the play, Game of Thrones: The Mad King, were more than a little dismayed last week when the shows, scheduled for July 20-24, were canceled. … A show on Saturday, July 25, was also called off just hours before the curtain was set to rise.” – The New York Times
- What If More Intelligence Doesn’t Make Us Better?
If we think of intelligence as the ability to extract information from data, then even an infinitely advanced model endowed with infinite compute will be limited by the fact that there’s a limited amount of information that can be extracted from the data. – Noahpinion
- Meet The Messi Of Ballet
In Argentina, they call her the Messi of ballet – although when it comes to who has the finest footwork, they should really be calling him the Núñez of football. – The Guardian
- Authors Have Mixed Feeling About Anthropic “Win”
One possible way for authors to get a fairer shake in the age of AI could be through the licensing of their work to AI companies. – NPR