Perhaps the most beautiful part of this digital heist is that all of this knowledge is being stolen in broad daylight. Napster was a rather minor and petty crime in comparison. - The Guardian
A nation’s “soft power” is “the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments” — foreign aid, public perception, and especially cultural exports such as movies and music. American soft power has been enormous, and Lily Janiak considers how it's being frittered away. - San Francisco Chronicle (MSN)
The lawsuit argues that the new requirement — that grant applicants must affirm that their projects will not “promote gender ideology” — violates the First and Fifth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution and the Administrative Procedure Act. - The Guardian
Cheryl Hickman, artistic director of Opera on the Avalon, will start a five-year term in July as chairperson of the federal Crown corporation the Canada Council for the Arts. - CBC
The play was Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, produced in 1996 by the Charlotte Repertory Theatre. Here’s the story of the fight about it started by a fundamentalist minister, the legal mechanism used to shut the play down, and the decades-long aftereffects of the debacle. - Charlotte Magazine
The integration of AI and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) proved especially powerful. SAR technology provides high-resolution images of structures buried beneath the earth's surface, capable of penetrating natural barriers such as sand, vegetation, and ice. - Jerusalem Post
After years of either cuts or stagnant funding, the New York City Council has allocated $4 million for arts instruction and programming in 239 schools (which is not all of them) across the city — all of $16,257 per school. - PIX11 (New York City)
To judge by the number of papers I read last semester that were clearly AI generated, a lot of students are enthusiastic about this latest innovation. It turns out, too, this enthusiasm is hardly dampened by, say, a clear statement in one’s syllabus prohibiting the use of AI. - The Walrus
Even beyond their economic potential, the cultural value of practices more traditionally associated with commercial activity has become more central to the national conversation. - The Conversation
Visibility is only part of the equation. Who controls it? How are cultural narratives shaped? What systems determine access? If we don’t ask these questions, we risk treating discoverability as just another distribution challenge, rather than a fundamental issue of power, representation, and digital agency. - Linked.In
Harvard is the flagship of American higher education ...and what started as a crisis of speech and authority on campus has grown into a fear that internal conflict, amplified by outside pressures, can run it and the whole fleet of American universities aground. - The New Yorker
“The French Government has announced a 50 percent cut in their lauded Culture Pass, four years after its nationwide launch for young people aged fifteen to eighteen to take up cultural activities.” - ArtReview
Three AI programs are set to replace lecture slides in the University of Auckland’s Digital Marketing 304 class when the first semester of the year begins on Monday. “Complete bull****,” one student enrolled in the course said. - New Zealand Herald
"We’ve now seen years and years of austerity, and it’s not just the arts that have taken a hit – it’s anything that sits on the periphery of the mainstream route to work. There do need to be questions asked about how we’re valuing the arts in this country.” - The Guardian
It can be fractured, confined, and eroded—perhaps not all at once, but over time if the conditions are not right for genius to flourish. Politicians can exercise their influence for short-term gain but if we look at the experience of the Soviets and the Nazis, such influence leads to long-term loss. - Nightingale Sonata
