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- Anti-Trans Political Rhetoric Is Harming Nonbinary And Trans Actors Too
Even actors like Elliot Page and Asia Kate Dillon have said it’s harder to find work in a world where roles for them are, according to them, vanishing. – CBC
- The Site Where Modern British Ballet Was Born
The Georgian style Festival Theatre – now the Cambridge Buddhist Centre – had recently undergone some intense architectural changes when its owner invited future Royal Ballet founder Ninette de Valois to choreograph there. – BBC (Yahoo)
- How A Quick-Thinking Photographer Turned A Traffic Jam Into An Instantly Iconic Image
“As we’re all waiting for traffic to clear, I could feel the motion of the bridge, slightly pulsating up and down. Curiosity got to many people, who got out of their cars to see if they could see anything.” – San Francisco Chronicle
- Serial Fiction Is Having A Moment. Again.
“’Today’s newspapers have fallen out of the habit of rewarding their readers with chunks of fiction. … So it has fallen to us to pick up the slack.’ But it seems worth asking why ‘chunks’ of fiction are their own reward.” – LitHub
- Ireland Has Become One Of Hollywood’s Go-To Global Production Hotspots
“Ireland increasingly has become a destination for American movies, television series and the once-quintessentially L.A. creation: the game show.” – Los Angeles Times
- Producer And Director Michael Mann Accidentally Shoots Himself At A Gun Range
“A representative for Mann said in a statement on Sunday that the director’s weapon had ‘accidentally discharged while holstered.’ The incident, the representative said, resulted in a ‘superficial injury.’” – Los Angeles Times
- AI Isn’t Just Cooking Our Water Supply And Our Writing, But Also Our Food
“Most of those bowls and sandwiches available in the lunchtime hours are sold by fast-casual chains, the kind of establishments that give private equity investors wet dreams thanks to their sky-high margins, low labor costs, and simplistic, trend-driven menus.” – Ravenous
- For A Few Hundred Euros, You Can Get A Rembrandt Inked On Your Body
“It’s a highbrow-meets-lowbrow thing,” said the Dutch tattoo artist completing the requests. He’s done it before, but “this time, [he] had a greater ambition: to reproduce one of Rembrandt’s most famous etchings, The Descent From the Cross, from 1633, across a man’s back.” – The New York Times
- This Oregon Museum Had To Sell Its Museum
And Tuesday’s election will determine what happens with its collection – and if its local advocates have done enough to organize support. – Oregon ArtsWatch
- Since 2008, Local Newsrooms Have Been Hurting For Cash
What do they do with it, though, when they get it? Well: “keep the lights on, … pay bills, pay down debt, make payroll, or [use it] as a buffer when something went wrong.” – Nieman Lab
- The Rise And Fall Of The Triumphal Arch
“In 1941, Albert Speer presented plans to his Führer for a monumental arch that would tower nearly 400 feet over Berlin. Taller than the towers of the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge in New York, it would have been twice the height of the Arc de Triomphe.” – The New York Times
- This Is How A Publishing Season’s ‘Big’ Cookbooks Come To Life
For instance: “You wouldn’t know it, but some of these dishes were shot on the literal ground.” – Best Food Blog
- The Dark Underbelly Exposed When One Author Wrote Back To His AI Spammers
The scammer “gave me a physical address. Neither of us commented on how unusual it was for the founder of the Berlin Book Club to have a postal address in the Philippines.” – The Guardian (UK)
- Playwright And Director Martin McDonagh Wants His Art, A Lot Of It About Murder, To Change The World
Martin McDonagh: “Plays should be as exciting as the best films, and that meant you should be able to do anything onstage that you can do in a film, which led to a little violence now and then, but always with a moral dimension to it.” – The New York Times
- The National Symphony Orchestra Hangs In The Balance
“The 95-year-old National Symphony Orchestra has been performing in the Kennedy Center since it opened in 1971. Now, the musicians and their charismatic music director Gianandrea Noseda are musical nomads while the future of the arts complex, with its proposed renovations, remains uncertain.” – NPR
- Suit: Kennedy Center Knew Closure Estimate Was Wrong
Good Morning,
The Kennedy Center’s board voted to close the building for two years after being told phased renovation would double the cost. A lawsuit filed Friday says officials had a revised estimate, about $41 million more, and never showed it to the board (CNN).
Archive of Our Own, the important fan fiction site with 11 million users, is down after a security incident and may take four weeks to restore. Fans are sharing Google Docs of saved stories (Wired).
Before Trump’s Dubuque rally, the White House advance team hung a tarp over the city’s 2020 “Solidarity” mural, ten raised fists. The city, which owns the building, hadn’t approved it and had it removed (KCRG).
A Times essay says predictive algorithms are making culture the same everywhere (The New York Times). Searches for CD players at John Lewis, the UK retailer, are up 96% since July (The Guardian).
All of our stories below.
- Why Hasn’t MoMA Kicked A Disgraced Epstein Buddy Off Its Board?
“Leon Black’s board position at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is one of the starkest examples of institutional ignorance — a head-in-the-sand, look-the-other-way mentality that will inevitably give abuse of power a dark corner to grow and fester in.” – Hyperallergic
- Solidarity Mural In Iowa, Covered By Blue Tarp In Advance Of Trump Visit, Ordered By The City To Be Uncovered
A spokesperson from the building’s management company: “The goal of the White House in covering the mural was to provide exterior branding and put up a U.S. flag.” But the city had not authorized any exterior modifications. – Des Moines Register (MSN)
- Algos Are Ruining Music, Young People Say
Hence: CDs are making a dramatic comeback. – The Guardian (UK)
- The La Brea Tar Pits Renovation Requires Packing, Moving, And Unpacking 3.5 Million Fossils
“Buried in the bones are clues about how plants and animals lived and died. Understanding why some of those species became extinct could help us.” – The New York Times
- You Don’t Know What The Algorithms Are Doing To Us Until You Walk Away
“Here’s the thing about spending a month off grid and overseas: … You are more relaxed than you have ever been, and you have forgotten the way nearly every news story of the past decade grabs hold of your heart and squeezes, twists, strangles. That constant, low-level dread.” – Slate
- Predictive Algorithms Are Flattening Culture Everywhere In The World
“At ‘temperature zero,’ the [large language] model always chooses the most likely next token and gives the same answer every time” – down to the music and menus in every restaurant or pub. – The New York Times
- How Will A24 Handle Four Oscar Contenders?
This used to be the frontrunner for A24 (before You Can See Everything): “Though The Invite wasn’t a huge blockbuster, one thing its fans keep mentioning is that it was, in its own way, a movie where the theatrical experience was paramount.” – Vulture
- A Third-Generation Opera Costumer Closes Down The Shop
Robert Stivanello: “The opera costume business has changed a lot. … Covid killed a lot of opera companies.” Now the knock-on effect has killed his company as well. – The New York Times
- How To Write Fictional AI In An Age Of Tech Bros
“Silicon Valley has become adept at repurposing science fiction as building blocks of its fantastical hype machine. When authors try to imagine a future in which machines have thoughts and feelings, their work instantly seems to get woven into a tapestry of bullshit.” – Happy Dancing
- The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame Gets A Whole New Look
“While the music never stops and its doors didn’t close, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is undergoing the largest renovation and expansion since it was built in 1995 — a $195 million, nine-year effort.” – The New York Times
- Taika Waititi Says He Never Reads Reviews, But Reacts Badly To The Bad Reviews Of His Most Recent Movie
“Let’s spare a thought for those sad lost souls who couldn’t achieve their dreams of becoming artists, and thus became critics. The same people who also hated Jojo Rabbit. Irrelevant. Out of touch. Obsolete. In the bin.” – Variety
- As AI Infiltrates Scholarly Writing, The Value Of A Journal Article Is Collapsing
“Unfortunately, the scholars submitting papers aren’t the only ones using AI. So are many of their peer reviewers. One recent peer review that my journal received—from a senior scholar—read like an unedited cut-and-paste job from an LLM.” – The Atlantic
- Dems Cite Internal Pressure To Cover Decline Under Trump In Lawsuit Over Kennedy Center
“‘Defendants are shuttering the Kennedy Center to hide the ongoing mismanagement of this once vibrant institution and to placate its current chairman,’ they wrote in the filing.” – The New York Times
- How Is It That All Books Have Suddenly Become ‘Gothic’?
It’s not just Spooky Season. “The Gothic label, once applied primarily to horror and dark romance, has been used to describe space operas, literary works and fantastical hybrids of all kinds.” – The New York Times
- Why We Like To Be Scared
“Because of horror’s position as a sandbox for misfortune, consumers tend to reward horror films that reflect their generation’s anxieties.” – Time
- Behind The Scenes With Alisa Weilerstein’s Cello
“It is a tragic situation, after all, for a piece of wood to have to plead with us for decency, love, and justice. It was the cello’s purest act of superheroism, to play Bach’s solo suites to a civilization sunk into depravity.” – Paris Review
- The Queen Of Fairy Smut, With A New Book And Loads Of Merch, Rises Again
“Maas hysteria gripped the Bell House in the hours before the book dropped. Fans traded conspiracy theories about future plot twists, got temporary tattoos and face paint, drank themed cocktails, posed for photos behind a giant cauldron and bought branded candles, bag charms and other memorabilia.” – The New York Times
- This Is How Users Are Dealing With AO3 Going Down
It’s … intense. “Fans are compiling Google Docs of links to downloaded stories, touting them as ‘survival guides’ for the ‘AO3 apocalypse’ and organizing them by fictional character pairings, or ships.” – Wired
- The Internet’s Most Wide-Open Site For Fan Fiction Goes Down After A Security Breach
Archive of Our Own, or AO3 as it’s known to many of its millions of users, may be down for up to a month. “A surge in traffic to archived versions of the site [is] now ‘putting a heavy load on the Wayback Machine.’” – The New York Times