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- The Web Fills Up And Empties Out
Good Morning,
Two numbers today, and they belong together. Traffic to the ten biggest US news sites is down by a third in two years (Press Gazette). More than a third of web pages published since ChatGPT launched show signs of machine authorship (TechCrunch). The open web is filling with writing nobody asked for and emptying of the readers who used to justify the rest.
Here’s what that does downstream: a hoax claiming the Tang Dynasty never existed is picking up genuine believers on the Chinese internet (CNN). Three centuries of poetry, apparently now up for a vote.
The counterexample is in theaters. Hadestown — a show built in front of live audiences for more than a decade before it got near a screen — just broke Hamilton‘s box office records (IndieWire). Nobody found it through a feed. That’s the point.
The bill still arrives: ICA San Diego laid off nearly half its staff (San Diego Union-Tribune), and a new study puts the Paramount-Warner merger’s cost to Los Angeles at 4,500 film and TV jobs (TheWrap).
Meanwhile, America’s first jellyfish museum has opened in Pompano Beach, built by a Ukrainian couple who left their Kyiv one behind in 2022 (AP).
All of our stories below.
- Behold America’s First-Ever Jellyfish Museum
“The private Jellyfish Museum in Pompano Beach, Florida, just north of Fort Lauderdale, … was created by Alex and Yana Yanovsky, who previously developed successful aquariums in Ukraine, including their first jellyfish museum in Kyiv. The couple left those facilities behind when they fled Ukraine following the 2022 Russian invasion.” – AP
- Study: Web Traffic To The 10 Biggest News Websites Has Dropped By A Third In Two Years
Combined traffic to the ten biggest news websites in the US is down by almost a third compared to two years ago, new analysis shows. The difference was even higher across the top 50 news websites in the US, with monthly visits falling 37% since July 2024. – Press-Gazette
- Weird Idea Spreads On Chinese Internet That Tang Dynasty Never Existed
The Tang era (618-907 CE) is considered a golden age, a period of territorial expansion, prosperity and high culture which every Chinese schoolchild learns about. Claiming it never happened is like telling Brits there was no Norman Conquest. Yet the bogus idea has caught on widely enough that China’s government is weighing in. – CNN
- How The COVID Crisis Shifted Culture Funding
In 2019, arts organizations in BIPOC-majority neighborhoods of a major U.S. city received 16% less median grant funding than those in white-majority neighborhoods. By 2022, they were receiving 289% more. – SMU Cultural Data
- Study: More Than One-Third Of Web Pages Created Since 2022 Show Signs Of AI
Over one-third of web pages published after the release of ChatGPT show signs of being written by AI, according to a new study from Pew Research released on Thursday. – TechCrunch
- Christian Band Demon Hunter Sues Netflix Over Megahit “KPop Demon Hunters” Movie
KPop Demon Hunters was the sleeper hit of 2025, dominating Netflix’s streaming numbers. The musical-fantasy produced by Sony Pictures Animation has over 600 million views since its debut in June of last year. – Movieweb
- Lenny Bruce And His Endless Battles With The Vice Cops
Working in the 1960s, when most standup was a succession of one-liners, Bruce used profanity, political satire, and sexual material which comedians today consider a basic right. Yet in his day he was regularly arrested and tried for obscenity; Phil Spector ultimately said Bruce died from “an overdose of police.” – Los Angeles Times (MSN)
- Dance Man Ted Striggles, 84
Ted Striggles, a dancer and lawyer who combined his disparate skills to support artists both struggling and successful, and to advise them on how to survive, including with his influential 1976 guide, “Poor Dancer’s Almanac,” died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan. – The New York Times
- How “Hadestown: The Musical” Became A Movie Hit
Billed as a “five night only” event, “Hadestown: The Musical” has extended its run in theaters for four weeks, thanks to popular demand. In the process, the filmed stage show has become an indie blockbuster, grossing $20.7 million. – Indiewire
- More Schools Are Teaching Cursive Again. Should They Be?
Pennsylvania and Florida legislators argue, for example, that an informed citizenry needs to be able to read historical documents, which are often written in cursive script. – Washington Post
- The Growing Threat Of Cyberattacks On Museums
We live in a time when digital systems underpin everything from ticketing to surveillance and building access. Sidelining cybersecurity leaves museums vulnerable to attacks that could threaten both their finances and their collections. – The Conversation
- Four Comics At Edinburgh Fringe Explain How They Developed Their Very Odd Characters
For instance, Sam Eley gives the background on his Basil Crumbwick, whose papier-mâché head makes him seven feet tall, while Katie Pritchard recounts the origin story of her Sir Elton Scone, who hosts a Great British Bake Off-style show which uses no ovens. – The Guardian
- How The Kennedy Center Plans To Put Trump’s Name Back
- What’s Changed In Classical Music Over 50 Years
What has surprised me, looking back to 1976 (when I started writing for a tiny magazine that sadly went out of business this year) is how much of the classical music landscape has survived, despite the economic pressures that you don’t need reminding about. – BBC Music
- Research: Large AI Datasets Obscure Authorship
It feels counterintuitive, but at sufficiently large scales, they find, you can often remove any single image from the training data, or every image by a given artist, or every photograph of a given person, and the generated sample doesn’t change. – MIT
- Paul Simon’s “Graceland” At 40
Hard as it may be to believe today, Graceland was not an instant hit when it came out, and Simon received criticism for what’s now called cultural appropriation and for violating sanctions against apartheid-era South Africa. Now its influence is widespread enough that it can be hard to perceive these decades later. – The Guardian
- How Adam Sklute Transformed Salt Lake City’s Ballet West
The ways that the company’s skill level, repertoire, national and international reputation, budget, and especially school (a ten-fold increase in enrollment) have grown during Sklute’s 20 years as artistic director are extraordinary. – The Utah Review
- Scammers Are Posing As Terry Gross To Catfish Authors And Media Figures
Comedy writer Brice Vilanch and psychologist Steven Pinker are among those who’ve been contacted by someone claiming to be not a producer but NPR host Gross herself or co-host Tonya Mosley, offering an interview on Fresh Air, displaying deep knowledge of the target’s work, then asking for “contributions.” – The Philadelphia Inquirer (MSN)
- Institute Of Contemporary Art San Diego Lays Off Nearly Half Its Employees
The ICA San Diego (not to be confused with the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego) is reducing its staff from 19 to 11, including almost all senior management and public-facing workers. The head curator position was eliminated last month. – The San Diego Union-Tribune
- Texas Is Coming After The “Filthy, Dirty” Books In School Libraries, Says Lt. Gov.
“Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, during a Wednesday press conference, threatened to take over public school districts that don’t remove ‘obscene books’ from their library shelves.” – San Antonio Current
- Utah Bans Novel Adapted Into Movie “Precious” From Schools
“’Push’ by Sapphire got cut across the state Wednesday after the Davis, Granite and Washington County school districts removed it, bringing the total number of books banned from public schools to 37.” Current Utah law holds that if three county school districts ban a book, the title is then barred statewide. – The Salt Lake Tribune
- L.A. Could Lose 4,500 Film/TV Jobs And Billions In Economy From Paramount-Warner Merger: Study
“Overall, the economic impact of losing these jobs would be $1.26 billion in wages, $2.78 billion in economic value, $4.06 billion in total business output and $547 million in tax revenue, including $78.6 million in local taxes — most of which (63%) comes from property taxes.” – TheWrap
- Who Vouches For The Work Now?
Good Morning,
Google has built a tool that tells fact-checkers whether an image was machine-made, whether it’s been altered, and where else it has surfaced (Nieman Lab). Provenance as a service — infrastructure for a question that didn’t really need infrastructure five years ago.
Which makes the day’s other verification story more difficult. Harvard is closing its writing center, and faculty read the timing as of a piece with the university’s enthusiasm for AI on campus (The Atlantic). We’re building machines to certify authorship while shutting the institutions where people learn to earn it. Small wonder 52% of Americans now say AI worries them more than it excites them, up from 37% in 2021 (Pew Research). The anxiety isn’t about capability. It’s about not knowing who made what, or who answers for it when it goes wrong.
No algorithm would have caught the first L.A. Jazz Festival, which imploded on opening day and left the scene that had lent it credibility furious (Los Angeles Times).
What people do trust: a place with something happening in it. Ragtime closed as the highest-grossing production in Lincoln Center Theater’s history (Deadline). And Gia Kourlas watched a champion surfer and saw a dancer (The New York Times). The map of what counts as choreography just got a little bigger.
The rest of today’s stories below.
- Could Disney Actually Win Its Lawsuit Against FCC Over Threats To ABC’s License?
“Disney has a far stronger case against (Trump-appointed FCC chairman Brendan) Carr than Carr has against Disney,” a former FCC chief of staff said. “I doubt any court would uphold Carr’s failure to renew Disney’s license.” Alas, it’s not quite that simple. – TheWrap (Yahoo!)
- In Russia: The Publishers’ Plot
In May 2025, ten people affiliated with Eksmo, Russia’s publishing behemoth, were detained in Moscow. Three of them, Pavel Ivanov, Dmitry Protopopov and Artyom Vakhlyaev, were charged with ‘organising activities of an extremist organisation’. Their crime was distributing LGBT-themed books. – London Review of Books
- Why Ever More Of Hollywood’s Production Is Happening Anywhere But Hollywood
“Los Angeles and California continue to struggle to keep movies, television series and even game shows from fleeing elsewhere. … The story of how L.A. steadily lost much of its homegrown industry to other locales is a tale of hubris, escalating costs, political inaction and fierce competition (from other locales).” – Los Angeles Times (MSN)
- The Fan Psychology
The fan at heart is a manager of excess: too much feeling, too much weight on too little incident. This is a kind of madness after all, the madness of meaning-making under a few too many constraints. – N plus 1
- Why The Closing Of Harvard’s Writing Center Matters
A Harvard faculty member who requested anonymity so that he could speak openly told me he worried that the elimination of the center could be seen as part of a broader trend of “real boosterism” of AI on campus—one that students feel acutely. – The Atlantic
- Research: Majority Of Americans Are Anxious About AI
Today, 52% of Americans say they are more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life – up from 37% in 2021. Another 9% are more excited than concerned and 37% say they’re equally excited and concerned, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted June 22-28, 2026. – Pew Research
- A Dance Critic Considers High-Level Surfing As Ballet
Gia Kourlas on champion Caitlin Simmers: “Her undulating torso, her sensitivity to the fluctuations of an unsteady surface and her speed are all part of her power. … Her clarity comes from her deep center of gravity, which allows her to slice up and down waves like a silken ribbon.” – The New York Times
- How Melancholy Became Hungary’s Literary Brand
Melancholy, an affinity with oblivion without a concrete cause, suffuses the Hungarian fiction translated for foreign audiences over the past 30 years, from the tortured tales of Sándor Márai to the taut novels of Magda Szabó. – The Guardian
- Did Smartphones Really Kill Reading?
It is tempting to blame smartphones for this condition and conclude that some kind of ban would solve the problem. But a historical perspective shows that this is not enough: reading was in decline before the smartphone appeared. – LitHub
- New Website Tracks Author Events
LitCircle’s database will track author readings and signings, as well as book clubs and literary festivals across the country, and alert readers to upcoming literary programming in their vicinity. George partnered with Patrick DiMichele, a technology consultant and a longtime Volumes customer, to build the platform. – Publishers Weekly
- To Promote Themselves, Some Standup Comics Are Switching From Posting Videos To This
“They use (comic strip-style) still frames with embedded captions of jokes, sometimes across multiple images that include longer setups and punchlines — in social media parlance, a carousel.” – The New York Times