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- Good Morning. Librarians and the AI back door
Here are today’s AJ highlights.
AI’s appetite spills into culture as The Atlantic reports Common Crawl feeding paywalled journalism to models. Legacy media gets a cold bath — the BBC is a “Titanic” unless it pivots, warns The Guardian. Dance has some rare good news: Marseille surges, says Dance Magazine; New York’s Joyce gets a $15M lifeline, reports The New York Times. And in the attention economy, interiority itself feels squeezed, argues Commonweal.
More of this week’s stories below.
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- Kristin Chenoweth On The Backlash To Her Tweet On Charlie Kirk’s Death
“It was tough on me, but I’m not going to answer any questions about it because I dealt with it. It nearly broke me, and that’s all I’m going to say. You probably know my heart, so you probably know. … Anybody that knows me knows how I believe.” – The Hollywood Reporter
- “The Baker’s Wife,” A Musical That’s Been Proofing In The Oven For 50 Years
Composer Stephen Schwartz and book writer Joseph Stein spent months on a pre-Broadway tour in 1976 trying to fix the show. It didn’t work, although one song, “Meadowlark,” became a hit. Since a revival in 2002, productions have been trying to address the piece’s problems, and now there’s a high-profile staging Off-Broadway. – TheaterMania
- In The Attention Economy, Our Inner Lives Are Shrinking
Roughly speaking, globalization flattens space and pares away cultural particularity; neoliberalism flattens value, reducing everything to its going rate on the market; the internet, and especially social media, flatten transactions and relationships into their barest, most instrumentalized form. – Commonweal
- No Master Thieves Here: Louvre Bandits Were Petty Criminals, Police Say
“This is not quite everyday delinquency … but it is a type of delinquency that we do not generally associate with the upper echelons of organized crime,” Laure Beccuau told France Info Radio. – ARTnews
- Is Marseille Becoming A Dance Capital?
“The Ballet National de Marseille has also taken a bold new direction under the leadership of the experimental collective (LA)Horde, producing edgy performances drawing on internet-native styles like jumpstyle and TikTok choreography. Dancers and choreographers are relocating to the city, too.” – Dance Magazine
- Book Publishing’s Horror Genre Is Breaking Records
2024’s total figure of 836,199 was its biggest volume performance since 2009 and, so far in 2025, we have seen 628,431 books pass through the tills, an increase of 6.7% against the first 42 weeks of last year. – The Bookseller
- NYC’s Joyce Theatre Gets $15M Boost For Dance
Two of New York’s most prominent dance philanthropists are donating $15 million to the Joyce Theater, a leading dance stage in Manhattan, helping to assure the theater’s long-term financial stability at a time when dance organizations are struggling with declining financial support and audiences. – The New York Times
- Librarians On The Front Lines Of Civilization
The librarian is a seeker and keeper of truth, and that makes her a dangerous figure in the eyes of those who fear the fullest, most comprehensive, and most uncomfortable truths emerging. – LitHub
- A Non-Profit Is Crawling Paywalled Content And Supplying It To AI Companies
Common Crawl has opened a back door for AI companies to train their models with paywalled articles from major news websites. And the foundation appears to be lying to publishers about this—as well as masking the actual contents of its archives. – The Atlantic
- DJing As Therapy For Ukrainian War Veterans
“At the Superhumans Centre, near Lviv, … the most critically war-wounded are treated with prosthetics and reconstructive surgery, and psychological support is given to children and adults affected by the war. And within the range of treatment is music therapy” — including “the EnterDJ programme, which teaches veterans the basics of mixing.” – The Guardian
- Trump’s Skill With Imperial Images
Trump’s aggressive moves to accumulate political power — deploying National Guard troops, invoking massive tariffs —have prompted protests and lawsuits as well as plaudits. But he is also asserting his power through what might be called an imperial aesthetic: surrounding his presidency with visual cues designed to project personal command and grandeur. – Washington Post
- Warning: BBC Is A Titanic On Collision Course
“The way that consumption habits have shifted over the last five years is almost more drastic than it was in the previous 50 years. You have a pre-TikTok and post-TikTok split in the way that consumption was felt and experienced by people.” – The Guardian
- Art Institute Of Chicago Is Building $50 Million Conservation Center
“The 25,000-square-foot facility, to be known as the Grainger Center for Conservation and Science, will contain conservation laboratories, offices and a study center as well as a gallery offering conservation-related exhibitions and opportunities to watch conservators at work.” Construction will begin early next year. – WBEZ (Chicago)
- Historic Philadelphia Theater To Become Cicely Tyson Performing Arts Center
The former Logan Theatre, a 1923 movie palace on Broad Street in North Philadelphia which has been empty since 1992, will undergo a $10 million dollar renovation. The venue will include a 2,650-seat theater for plays and musicals, a 200-seat restaurant with live jazz, and a 4,000-square-foot gift shop. – The Philadelphia Inquirer (MSN)
- Grade Inflation At Elite Colleges: Students Are Obsessed With “Points Taken Off”
Harvard administrators have released a statement saying that grade inflation has crossed a catastrophic threshold. Many Harvard undergrads treated the statement as a catastrophe in itself. (Yes, tears were shed.) Yet, writes Ian Bogost, there are pressures on both students and instructors which just about guarantee grade inflation. – The Atlantic (MSN)
- It’s Official: The Big, Weird, Brutalist Fountain In San Francisco Will Be Removed
“A divided San Francisco Arts Commission on Monday approved a plan to at least temporarily remove the Vaillancourt Fountain from Embarcadero Plaza, a final sign-off that means the massive artwork could be dismantled as soon as early next year.” – San Francisco Chronicle (Yahoo!)
- For First Time, Diary Collection Wins Baillie Gifford Prize For Nonfiction
“How to End a Story: Collected Diaries by Helen Garner charts the Australian writer’s life from her early career in bohemian Melbourne to raising her daughter in the 1970s and her disintegrating marriage in the 1990s.” The jury’s vote was unanimous, with one judge calling it “a remarkable, addictive book.” – BBC (Yahoo!)
- Prix Goncourt, France’s Top Literary Prize, Goes To 20th-Century Family Saga “The Empty House”
“Laurent Mauvignier Tuesday won France’s top literary award, the Goncourt, for his family saga spanning the 20th century and recounting the story of his grandmother accused of collaborating during World War II. Just one round of voting sufficed for the jury to select La Maison Vide.” – AFP (Yahoo!)
- Medieval Tower In Rome Collapses, Kills Worker
During renovations on the 13th-century Torre dei Conti, the structure started to collapse, trapping two workers. During the 11-hour rescue operations, passersby watched as more of the tower crumbled. Both of the trapped men were rescued alive, though one died of his injuries shortly afterward. – AP
- Some Folks Are Not Happy About Philadelphia Art Museum’s Rebrand, And That Includes Some Board Members
“Critics say the new logo and its angular griffin look severe — more like a soccer team, a clothing brand, or a beer label than an art museum.” What’s more, some board members say they weren’t shown the final design for approval and only learned about the rollout from the press. – The Philadelphia Inquirer (MSN)
- Opera America Names New President And CEO
Michael Bobbitt comes to OPERA America from the Mass Cultural Council in Boston, MA, where he served as Executive Director since 2021. – BroadwayWorld
- Anne Sexton’s Horror Short Stories, Rejected By The New Yorker
Editor Roger Angell called the three stories “interesting and wholly original” but said “they seem to work in very different ways on different readers.” At least he allowed that “I’m not at all sure that we aren’t making a mistake.” That must have stung Sexton, always unsure of herself when writing prose. – Literary Hub
- Meet The New Head Of The UK Opera Association
“The perception that opera is only for posh people, with which I fundamentally disagree, has taken a grip on a lot of decision-makers,” Thangam Debbonaire says. “But even if we do win them over, we have to accept that constraints on public finances aren’t going away any time soon.” – The Times (UK)
- Choreography By AI?
AISOMA is a Google AI-powered choreography tool that acts as a creative catalyst by generating new, original dance rooted in my choreographic language. – Google
- Sasha Suda Fired As Director Of Philadelphia Art Museum
Suda, who has been leading a change campaign at the museum since she arrived in 2022, reportedly has both supporters and detractors on the board. – Philadelphia Magazine
- The Persistent, Pernicious Myths About Shakespeare And Marlowe
The Romantic ideal of a singular creative genius remaking the rules of his era doesn’t really match William Shakespeare, who was (for a theater guy) fairly conventional. Christopher Marlowe is a better fit, and he transformed more than he gets credit for, but mythmaking distorts his image as well. – The Atlantic (Yahoo!)
- Spotify Reports Strong Subscriber Gains, Record Profits
- Australia Imposes New Streaming Quotas
The rules require Netflix, Prime Video and the other global streamers with more than one million Australian subscribers to spend 10% of their total Australian expenditure – or 7.5% of their revenues – on local originals. – Deadline
- What Immanuel Kant Still Has To Teach Us Today
The central insight that these disparate thinkers took from Kant is that the world isn’t simply a thing, or a collection of things, given to us to perceive. Rather, our minds help create the reality we experience. – The New Yorker
- Movie Theater Owners Are Freaking Out Over Possible Sale Of Warner Bros. Discovery
“Multiple theatrical executives … conveyed a sense of grave concern, if not panic, over the possibility of a studio that grossed more than $4 billion worldwide this year and provided many of the box office hits of the past six months being assimilated into another company and having its output dramatically curtailed.” – TheWrap (Yahoo!)
- What Do We Need Hobbies For?
Although many have outward-facing aspects, a hobby is ultimately a form of self-cultivation, pursued for reasons of personal satisfaction. Our society values publicity and productivity: perhaps that’s one reason that hobbies seem like they’re in decline. – The New Yorker
- Not Bulldozing The White House Was A Convention, Not A Law. Many Things In Government Have Been So
After the architects’ convention in 1900, public officials turned to specialists to address questions of aesthetic and space planning that had previously been matters of politics and patronage. Over the decade that followed, most public-building projects in D.C. came under a system of formal design review. – The Atlantic
- Documenting The Present Is Resistance
Let this be painfully clear: The future will only remember what is preserved today, and the choice is between standing by as stories are diluted or destroyed—or fighting for the record, for the archive, and for the truth with steady, everyday work that anyone can participate in. – Common Dreams
