More than one million subscriptions to Apple, Spotify, and other services have been cancelled - with a large percentage of people saying that's to save money. It's suddenly a nervy time to be in streaming. - BBC
"At the pop-up concert outside the cafe, wind threatened to blow sheet music away, and buses pulled in and out of the nearby terminal, but that didn’t deter the nearly 100 people who gathered to listen." - MSN (Boston Globe)
The competition was overshadowed by Russia's attacks on Ukraine; silver medal winner Anna Geniushene fled Russia for Lithuania and has been critical of the war, and bronze medalist Dmytro Choni is from Ukraine. Yunchan Lim, who won gold, is the youngest winner ever, at 18. - The New York Times
"The arrangement seems to have been made entirely at random, unless you know the quirk by which it was conceived. Books are placed next to one another for companionship, based on some kinship or shared sensibility that I believe ties them together." - The Atlantic
Hall wrote by hand in the mornings: "I go into, as I call it, Sarah Connor mode from The Terminator: out there, here’s my child, what do I need to do? Get buff! I got pains in my hand because I wasn’t used to writing so much." - The Guardian (UK)
Two actors were killed when their van flipped off the highway, and six other actors and crew members were injured. "One person said that actors on the set had complained about transportation issues, including tired drivers." - Los Angeles Times
Part of the issue is language. "On the one hand, PaLM and other large language models are capable of understanding in the sense that if you tell them something, its meaning registers. On the other hand, this is nothing at all like human understanding." - The Atlantic
Though the Ukrainian entry won the 2022 version of the competition, the war makes Ukraine as a host impossible, according to the European Broadcast Corporation - which is now looking to Britain, home of this year's runner-up. - The New York Times
Chefs love the food focus, but also aren't real happy with some issues. Alton Brown: 15-second clips on TikTok "trivialize cooking in a way that I find potentially harmful because we’re going to have a whole generation who think that cooking is just putting nuts in ice cream." - Variety
"In 2016, at 89, Opal Lee walked from her home in Fort Worth, Texas, to Washington, D.C., to help get Juneteenth made a federal holiday, which it finally was in 2021." Now Lee's Juneteenth collection, and her vision, have spurred the creation of a new museum. - The New York Times
Joe Monteleone was also born Deaf. During COVID lockdowns, he recreated Melbourne's iconic Flinders Street Station and "estimates he spent between 30 to 70 hours on each of the 12 squares, more than 800 hours in total. The station’s famous clock took four hours alone." - The Guardian (UK)
"Financial losses specifically from NFT crimes just through May this year were already more than 600% higher than for all of 2021, with the space seeing twice as many hacks and bigger and bigger heists. ... For many victims, there’s little hope of getting their lost art back." - Los Angeles Times
Joel Whitburn, who published nearly 300 books, "was a music lover whose personal collection — meticulously curated in his basement and, later, in a vault — totals more than 200,000 records, including every single ever to make a Billboard chart." - The New York Times
That is, the personal brand. Thanks, internet culture. "We’ve arrived at a new era of anonymity, in which it feels natural to be inscrutable and confusing—forget the burden of crafting a coherent, persistent personal brand. There just isn’t any good reason to use your real name." - The Atlantic
