“Is the Times always going to be fundamentally a news company expanding into these ancillary tech products?” she asked. “Or is it trying to morph into something like a tech company with an ancillary news product?” - Semafor
It turns out that the strategy of exploitation prevails in fiction at large. Knowing the topics of just a few books by an author, fairly accurate predictions can be made about the rest of their books. - Psyche
Drama Centre London stopped taking new students in 2019 before shutting. ALRA, one of England’s most established performing arts institutions, suddenly collapsed. Musical Theatre Academy closed its doors. At Roehampton University, the BA (hons) in drama has been discontinued. - The Stage
What is the arts writer’s beat? Are we still on it when we take a stand about something happening inside a major arts institution, and platform its workers instead of those at the top? Philly’s smaller, independent arts publications say yes. - Broad Street Review
Pleasure activists believe that, by tapping into the potential goodness in each of us, we can generate justice and liberation, growing a healing abundance where we have been socialized to believe only scarcity exists. - Boston Review
Stable Diffusion’s AI allows users to create images from other pictures, drawn on the spot. That’s right: Input your napkin doodles and half-sketched masterpieces and AI will produce a complete image. (Well, sort of.) - Hyperallergic
"I began to enjoy its warmth and inclusivity, the way everyone was equally gathered under its umbrella. I had to admit: It didn't feel sexist, racist or classist. It felt friendly and — most of the time — genuine." Maud Newton's paean to the second-person plural pronoun. - The New York Times Magazine
The rate of the decline has slowed this fall, with college enrollment dropping 1.1% since last autumn. Over the first two years of the Covid-19 pandemic, enrollment fell about 6.5%. About 1.5 million fewer students are enrolled in college than before the pandemic. - The Wall Street Journal
One has to wonder, with the cancellation of an institution like Neighbours, the moving of Days of Our Lives to streaming-only, and fading ratings for such stalwarts as EastEnders. Even telenovelas are starting to lose audiences in Latin America. However, the genre may not be disappearing as much as morphing. - BBC
The Court’s grappling with Warhol’s cultural criticism may end up being its most revealing comment this term on the nature of its own role in contemporary culture. - The New Yorker
"Whichever culture you inhabit, it is likely that dancing is a part of it. ... To gyrate rhythmically to music in the presence of others – the closer you look at this custom, the stranger it seems – is an activity whose roots in the human psyche go deep. Why do we do it?" - The Independent (UK)
Just how much coddling do theatergoers need these days? An audience advisory for the touring production of the recent revisionist Broadway revival of “Oklahoma!” gives a jarringly literal spin to the term “trigger warning.” - Washington Post
"I think (they've) actively dumbed down the audience. And so the attention span of the majority of the audience is much less ... and I don't think plays are going to have long lives on Broadway — I feel as though it's turning into Disneyland, a circus and Las Vegas." - Variety
The Louvre mother ship in Paris will lend Leonardo's Saint John the Baptist to its Gulf outpost for two years beginning next month, just as the museum is celebrating its fifth anniversary. - The National (Abu Dhabi)
Rupert Christiansen: "This would allow them a rebirth – a radical rethink of their function and structure. Will this happen? No. But when the Levelling Up agenda starts calling for a transfer of funds from London to the regions, ACE's officers might grudgingly acknowledge the justice of my case." - The Spectator
