I think Hollywood used to propose itself as a place where artists and creative people could sustain themselves, perhaps even strike it rich, and that’s gone. The loss of that idea is … incalculable. - Los Angeles Times
By thinking of language as a mathematical category, Tai-Danae Bradley's been able to apply established tools to study it and glean new insights. Linguists hope her model can help them to prove certain theories about how grammar and meaning emerge from strings of words, and to identify how AI-generated text differs from human language. - Quanta
As the English degree craters, and the idea of the university itself is under assault in the United States and elsewhere, those of us who remain interested in literate culture are sensing in its decline some correlation with the current apoplexy, if not direct causation. - 3 Quarks Daily
Conservatives have painted D.E.I. as a uniform set of programs, ideas, and ideologies. In reality, the term encompasses a wide-ranging set of practices. Still, D.E.I. spaces often share certain analytic frameworks, usually centering on questions of justice. - The New Yorker
Meta cited an expert witness who downplayed the books' individual importance, averring that a single book adjusted its LLM's performance "by less than 0.06 percent on industry standard benchmarks, a meaningless change no different from noise." Thus there's no market in paying authors to use their copyrighted works, Meta says. - Futurism
“Directors owning their own movies is the opposite of business as usual — and to studios, cause for freaking out. According to senior executives at rival studios, the Sinners deal sets a ‘very dangerous’ precedent.” - Vulture
This author thinks so: “When you stop making middle-class movies — movies with a moderate budget, as opposed to ones made on a shoestring or ones that cost $200 million — you’re hollowing out a middle class of people who make them.” - Los Angeles Times (MSN)
Alexey Brodovitch’s Ballet gets an 80th anniversary reprint. He "intended to foreground shape, blur, contrast, gesture and motion — the atmosphere of dance — in the photographs. ‘The photograph is not only a pictorial report,’ Brodovitch said. ‘It is also a psychological report.’” - The New York Times
"Earlier this month, a group of protesters gathered outside the London headquarters of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. They were demonstrating over the company’s use of millions of pirated books and research papers to feed their family of generative AI models.” - The Guardian (UK)
“The continued fight over Van Gogh’s tree roots has cast a pall over what is usually a celebratory season in Auvers, population 7,000, where art tourism is a big business that heats up in the spring.” - The New York Times
It’s the food trucks. Their owners or renters are gone, or in hiding, never opening their doors. In this version of the Big Apple, “the usual recourse to a quick, tasty and cheap snack is now an endangered option.” - El País
Then the Academy, apparently not fearless, censored the lecture. "I did not want to cause them trouble. I did, however, feel it was essential to make the point that the pursuit of wisdom is impossible without engaging with (and challenging) uncomfortable ideas.” - The New York Times
Despite the decades of neglect, when a new “Chicago museum’s leadership was pursuing oral histories of public housing, they found other narratives as well — of community, empowerment and self-sufficiency.” - Washington Post (MSN)
“Theme always comes last. I never say, I want to write about capitalism or women. What gets me into writing is always this tiny moment of someone saying something that’s stuck with me.” - The Guardian (UK)
