LACMA has bet everything on reinvention. The $724-million David Geffen Galleries open this week, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has essentially demolished and rebuilt itself — trading a fragmented campus for a single hovering megastructure (Los Angeles Times). Across the Atlantic, London's National Gallery has tapped Kengo Kuma to design a $464-million wing that will push...
To survive the next four years, to make sense of where all this could be going, we need to understand barbarism as a living, ever-present force tending always to cruelty and destruction. And more important: We need to understand how culture pushes back against it. - Washington Post (MSN)
It does feel a bit ironic, but it's good to have, for instance, Ukranian writer Vasily Eroshenko's "set of Esperanto fairy tales — stories about mice and flowers and paper lanterns — that are quaint on the surface but also scathing critiques of Western civilization’s deficiencies" in English. - Washington Post
The judge wrote that the IA had simply “copied the Works in Suit wholesale for no transformative purpose and created ebooks that … competed directly with the licensed ebooks.” The ruling went beyond this to say that controlled digital lending, or CDL, violates copyright law. - The Atlantic
The libraries are steadfastly refusing to do such a thing, and the mayor is on thin - if any - legal grounds, but there's a fundraiser for the library just in case. - LitHub
"Mayer was a proud nerd ... shared those passions with readers and listeners through her reviews of sci-fi, fantasy, romance, thrillers and comics, her trusty on-the-scene reporting at Comic-Con, and her contributions to the Book Concierge." - NPR
The social media giant "has algorithmically surfaced false information about conspiracy theories and vaccines, and was instrumental in the ability of an extremist mob to attempt a violent coup." But "the Facebook we have in the United States is actually the platform at its best." - The Atlantic
