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- The Problem(s) With Trying To Define Intelligence
What is Intelligence? simply reduces everything to physical implementations, either in AI neural networks or in the brain, and often conflates the two. – Inference Review
- Latino Group Opposes Paramount/Warner Deal
A prominent Latino group is raising fresh concerns about Paramount Skydance’s proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, saying the blockbuster deal would crush Latino workers and small businesses that support Hollywood. – Los Angeles Times
- Historic LA Performing Center Reopens After 15-Year Renovation
After a 15-year renovation, South L.A.’s historic Vision Theatre Performing Arts Center is reopening, marking a major milestone for Leimert Park and a $40-million investment in Black arts and culture. – Los Angeles Times
- Hollywood Trade Mag Pays Farewell Tribute To Gustavo Dudamel
“He doesn’t have a pretentious bone in his body, eagerly embracing the way … rockers bashed away at a late-19th-century Russian suite. And just as eagerly, he embraced the world of film music so completely that he became only the second LA Phil music director with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.” – TheWrap
- For These Movement Artists, It’s Not Site-Specific Dance, It’s “Site-Responsive Dance”
“Fluency in a variety of movement techniques — including street dance, acrobatics and, especially, parkour — allows these dancers to shape seemingly unbounded interactions with their environments. Is that chain-link fence asking to be hurdled with a flip? Could those four stories of scaffolding become a creative jungle gym?” – The New York Times
- Dutch Broadcaster Says It Will Boycott Eurovision Song Contest Again
“AVROTROS will not participate in the Eurovision Song Contest in 2027 because the event can no longer be considered neutral, with a participating country still involved in a large-scale military conflict,” the network said, though the decision on the Netherlands’ participation remains up to national public broadcaster NPO. – AP
- Meet Mamdani’s, And NYC’s, New Arts Commissioner
Diya Vij: “We know the presence of art in a neighborhood leads to better outcomes in health, safety and education. We know it matters to the economy, to people’s bodies, to relationships, to their ability to find each other. On a policy level, it’s essential to the full life of a New Yorker.” – Gothamist
- Elections Flip Control Of Florida School Board At Center Of Book Bans And Culture Wars
“Two Democratic-backed candidates beat out conservatives in Tuesday’s school board election in Sarasota, Florida, flipping the board’s majority. Helmed for the past year by a co-founder of Moms for Liberty, … the board is moving in a new direction, the winners said.” – The Washington Post (Yahoo!)
- UK Looks Headed For Record Year In Print Book Sales
According to NielsenIQ BookScan, sales of print books across the British consumer market have passed £1 billion at the earliest point in the calendar year since records began. – The Bookseller (UK)
- Russian Drone Strikes Hit Art Museum In Kherson
“According to a report by United24, the Ukrainian government–run platform, the fire destroyed the museum’s historic plasterwork, parquet flooring, furniture, and books, as well as the building’s electrical and heating infrastructure.” No human casualties were reported. – ARTnews
- Prove You’re Human
Good Morning,
A small publisher, buried under AI-generated pitches, will now take them only by phone (Nieman Lab). When producing a plausible submission costs nothing, the only useful filter is one the machine can’t cheaply fake, and right now that’s a voice on a live line.
That verification cost is everywhere. More than a million people have already clicked LinkedIn’s AI-reporter button (The Verge), so the slop is arriving faster than anyone can sort it. Police have been reduced to announcing that the Cat in the Hat is not real, after AI TikToks persuaded people otherwise (BBC). SFMOMA’s AI-assisted Matisse poses the institutional version: what exactly is a museum vouching for when it hangs one (The Atlantic)?
The distribution end of culture, meanwhile, is being settled in private. Trump intervened in the Live Nation antitrust prosecution (WSJ), while California’s attorney general walked out of Paramount settlement talks and looks set to demand channel divestitures (The New York Times).
And in Iceland, where murders barely happen, crime novelists work overtime to make a body believable (The New York Times). Scarcity as a craft problem.
All of our stories below.
- The Classical Music Superfans
These stories from the classical music world are particularly jarring. It’s easy to stomach the idea of Swifties doing what they do: that’s part of their culture. But classical music fans have long cultivated an image of sophistication. – The Conversation
- Was Howard Zinn’s “People’s History” Too Simplistic?
Zinn presented his readers with genuinely admirable dissidents, from Bartolomé de las Casas to Ida Tarbell and Langston Hughes. At a moment when the country needs effective dissidents, Zinn, the scholar-activist, is in that pantheon. But A People’s History’s had flaws: It can flatten complex problems and people into apparently simple ones. – The New Republic
- Why Is It So Hard To Buy Movie Tickets Right Now?
Theater chain apps suffered apparent outages as moviegoers waited in long virtual lines, hoping to finally glimpse a seat map with some empty spots left on it. In Manhattan, those who have grown mistrustful of this unreliable tech found time on a weekday morning to line up around the block at AMC Lincoln Square. – Wired
- Smithsonian Considers Workaround For National Latino Museum
On Aug. 31, the Smithsonian will consider whether to give the Latino Museum its Arts and Industries Building, which was built in 1881 and is on the National Mall between the Smithsonian’s Castle and Hirshhorn Museum. – The New York Times
- Remembering Miami’s Coconut Grove Playhouse
Over the next 50 years, until its sudden closing in 2006, the playhouse earned a reputation as one of the leading regional theaters in the country, producing a mix of classic and new plays, many of them hits and some flops. – Miami Herald
- Does AI Really Belong In A Museum?
It’s not like most of these flyers were ever going to be high art anyway. Still, the issue nags at me constantly, whenever I pass one of these synthetic images plastered over the real world. – The Atlantic
- Study: Language Skills Don’t Decline In Older Adults
Unless impaired by a stroke or dementia, most older people retain their language skills and may even improve them as they steadily gain vocabulary throughout their lives. A new brain imaging study from an MIT-Boston University collaboration now reveals the neural activity underlying this observation. – MIT News
- California Attorney General Cancels Paramount Settlement Talks
Rob Bonta, the attorney general, called off the meeting late Sunday, accusing Paramount of acting in bad faith. In a statement to The Times, Mr. Bonta accused Paramount of leaking details of a meeting the parties held on Friday. – The New York Times
- Trump Intervened In The LiveNation Antitrust Prosecution
The Justice Department was preparing to wage a legal battle more than a decade in the making against the world’s largest concert promoter. Then President Trump called. Settle it, the president told a senior DOJ official, the official later told associates. – The Wall Street Journal
- California Expected To Ask Paramount To Divest Channels From Warner Deal
California Attorney General Rob Bonta is expected to ask Paramount to divest some cable channels and commit to keeping its movie studio separate from Warner Bros. before he signs off on the $81 billion merger, people familiar with the matter said. – The Wall Street Journal
- In A Country With Almost No Actual Murders, Writers Have To Make Mysterious Deaths Believable
The authors’ “plots have to be built on buried grudges and horrifying secrets hidden in the fog and the fjords. Otherwise, how else could they convincingly kill off their characters?” – The New York Times
- LinkedIn Added An AI Slop Button, And People Are Clicking It A Whole, Whole Lot
Since July 30th, more than a million people have clicked on the button accessible on each post. – The Verge
- This Small Publisher Will Now Only Accept Pitches By Phone
The strategies to defeat AI are getting, well, old-school: “We’re re-humanizing the process with a dedicated hotline (which has the added benefit of weeding out supposed reporters who aren’t in the habit of ringing up strangers.” – Nieman Lab
- The Music Scams Of Yesteryear
As Columbia House closes, Millennials and Gen-Xers are wishing for a bygone era of “customer-service runarounds, unwelcome bills and general scuzziness,” all of which Columbia House perpetrated to great profits for years. – Salon
- The Musicians Bringing Classical Sounds To Rural Oregon And Washington
“The group formed in 1999 to bring classical music to communities that may otherwise not have access to it. It consists of three ensembles,” including one that attracts kids to music and “adults later in life” back to music. – OPB
- A New Report Accuses A Marseille Museum’s Director Of Sexual Misconduct
The report “accuses Pierre-Olivier Costa, the recently suspended president of Marseille’s Musée des civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée (MuCEM), of sexual and moral harassment, breaching rules for granting public contracts, and putting the southern French city’s only national museum ‘at risk.’” – ARTnews
- An Amazon Studios Movie Suddenly, Mysteriously Disappeared From Prime
And the reason that happened (probably not the reason you think it is) says a lot about where we are with ownership and access to digital stuff. – Reactor
- Inside Mattel, Where The Toy Story Toys Come To (Plastic) Life
“It’s art and science. You can have the best idea on paper, but if you can’t manufacture it, it doesn’t matter. Or if you can manufacture something that’s okay, but not great, it’s not worth it either.” – El País English
- Movies Have Been Exploring Manhood, Or What It Means To Be A Man, For As Long As Movies Have Existed
But, cautionary moment (akin to making movies about war): “Sometimes the filmmakers, they can kind of get wrapped up in the bad behavior … of the men that they’re trying to critique.” Think Fight Club. – NPR
- Viral, Often AI-Generated, TikToks Have Police Announcing The Cat In The Hat Isn’t Real
Wild: “Many of the AI generated images have been centred on the Irish counties of Limerick and Wexford, where shaky videos purportedly showed the character wandering through the streets, causing alarm and confusion among residents.” – BBC
- Pacific Northwest Ballet Is Spending Millions Of Dollars To Reimagine Sleeping Beauty
The idea is that most people access ballet through a story ballet – often, even usually, Nutcracker, but also Sleeping Beauty. It was, simply, time for a refresh – including 268 new costumes. – PBS
- California Has The Publishing Rizz Right Now
But it’s a bit nervewracking: “I feel like for a small press you really need to, not just catch a break, but catch a break every time, … if you want to last.” – Los Angeles Times (MSN)
- An Eighties Pop Star Reinvents Herself In – Where Else ? – Musical Theatre
Tiffany – of the gorgeously fun teen sex anthem “I Think We’re Alone Now” fame – will relive the ’80s, “making her Off Broadway debut in Spandex the Musical. She plays Linda, a housewife who escapes a life of domestic drudgery to compete in a national aerobics championship.” – The New York Times
- Boston Musicians, Management Agree To A 48-Hour Contract Extension
Though the union didn’t answer questions — and management press releases can be pressure tactics of their own — the extension seems like a good sign as “the BSO announced Sunday that a ‘ratification vote’ is in the offing.” – Boston Globe