"In a forthcoming book, Why Beethoven, Norman Lebrecht presents evidence that the Bagatelle No. 25 in A minor has been known as Für Elise (For Elise) purely due to a misreading of the dedication on the now-lost 1810 manuscript." - The Observer (UK)
Things didn't go well: "Because an AI program can’t 'be there,' it ends up, like a lazy college freshman, culling what material it can find floating around the internet and regurgitating it in a generic format." And the factual errors weren't great either. - Dallas Morning News
"The test allows users to listen to the audio featured in TikTok videos in the background. Until now, putting TikTok into the background paused playback. The audio portion of TikTok videos is hardly what most creators would consider a podcast. But it's the word the app is using." - Inside Radio
As with ABT Studio, Ailey II, and other companies (largely in the US), BRB2 will offer limited-term contracts (in this case, two years) to dancers just finishing school, giving them experience beyond just the corps de ballet before starting full-fledged careers. BRB2's first UK tour will be this spring. - SeeingDance
"Over a dozen interviews with former Ticketmaster executives, managers, economists, lawmakers, antitrust experts, fans and industry insiders, many agreed that Ticketmaster is enormous and largely unaccountable to fans. But, they said, it is also a mostly effective business with few peers capable of operating at its scale." - Yahoo! (Los Angeles Times)
Some, though not all, museums in the UK have started moving away from the term "mummy" to describe deliberately preserved human remains from ancient Egypt and elsewhere. The idea is that "mummified remains" or "mummified person" removes the pop-culture association with old horror movies. - CNN
"Still recovering its credibility after the headline-making FBI raid of its blockbuster Basquiat exhibition last year, the Orlando Museum of Art has been placed on probation by the American Alliance of Museums." - ARTnews
"A person with knowledge of the project who was granted anonymity ... said that as of Thursday, the movie was still on track to be completed with Mr. Baldwin in the lead role and Joel Souza, who was wounded in the shooting, returning as director." - The New York Times
At the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth, two protestors spray-painted the logo of the company Woodside Energy on the perspex shield covering the museum's best-known painting. The point? To bring attention to Woodside's "ongoing desecration" of ancient indigenous rock art in the north of the state. - The Guardian
States and districts nationwide have begun to constrain what librarians can order. At least 10 states have passed laws giving parents more power over which books appear in libraries or limiting students’ access to books, a Washington Post analysis found. - Washington Post
There’s little evidence that many of these initiatives work. And the specific type of diversity training that is currently in vogue — mandatory trainings that blame dominant groups for D.E.I. problems — may well have a net-negative effect on the outcomes managers claim to care about. - The New York Times
I decided to try a combination of tools to see if the AI-assisted work product would outperform my purely original work. Unsurprisingly, the work done in partnership with my AI-coworker outperformed work I did alone. - Shelly Palmer
Some Wikipedia contributors have a hard time trusting Wikimedia Foundation designers. No one on the paid design team was around 12 years ago when the last skin was made, and only some of them were involved with the wiki communities before they were hired. - Slate
The prize’s founder, Scott Griffin, had anticipated some controversy, if not this degree of fury. He maintains trustees made the right call. After twenty-two years, it was time to revisit the prize structure and the question whether Canadian poets still needed their own category. - The Walrus
At the end of the day, fandoms are grey areas: on the one hand, they can be a place where you can really belong and feel included but, on the other, they can also take over your life. - The Walrus
