“Sports is defying ratings gravity, exerting even more influence with each passing season as by far the dominant genre that people prefer to watch live, which has significant implications for sponsors pushing products on a schedule.” - TheWrap (Yahoo!)
When AI searchbots, with Meta (52% of AI searchbot traffic), Google (23%), and OpenAI (20%) leading the way, clobber websites with as much as 30 Terabits in a single surge, they're damaging even the largest companies' site performance. - The Register
The real reason that indie started to die is Spotify. As streaming supplanted downloads and album sales, it automated music discovery. Instead of reading Pitchfork or asking a record-store clerk for recommendations, more and more people began to let algorithms suggest their next obsession. This had a variety of consequences. -The Atlantic
“Our attention span — or patience — for enduring these far-too-frequent tragedies appears to be shrinking. The horror persists, but the novelty is fading, fueled by a sense of numbness, or perhaps a desire, faced with an inability to change or adequately address the situation, to simply tune it out.” - TheWrap (Yahoo!)
WGBH, the bellwether public TV station in Boston, has laid off the 13 people who worked on the history series “American Experience” and announced that no new documentaries will be produced for the show until further notice. - The New York Times
Kaitlyn Sardin, a twentysomething African-American from Orlando who won her first junior world championship in 2009, now mixes up traditional Irish dance with hip-hop, Afrobeat and voguing. She’s amassed over 100,000 followers on Instagram and TikTok and performed in Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter tour. - Dance Magazine
Director Emilie Gordenker says the original building, which is owned by the Dutch state, is in such poor condition it needs urgent and extensive repairs to keep its priceless collection and visitors safe. - US News
Meta has appropriated the names and likenesses of celebrities – including Taylor Swift, Scarlett Johansson, Anne Hathaway and Selena Gomez – to create dozens of flirty social-media chatbots without their permission, Reuters has found. - Reuters
Generative AI, with its ability to spit out seemingly unique content, has divided the music world, with musicians and industry groups complaining that recorded works are being exploited to train AI models that power song generation tools. - APNews
The Guitar Player, housed at Kenwood in London, is signed by Vermeer and accepted as authentic. There’s a slightly different version in the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s collection, long assumed to be a later copy; in 2023, one scholar suggested it was Vermeer’s own copy. Now they can be seen side-by-side. - The Guardian
The world that received “Hamilton” in July 2020, however, was not the world that had made it the toast of the 2016 Tony Awards. The show’s promise of a multiethnic America fueled by immigrant ingenuity seemed, after four years of the Trump presidency, like an Obama-era fantasy. - The New York Times
Despots over the ages devised a lopsided way of funding science that punished blue-sky thinkers and promoted gadget makers. Mr. Trump’s science policies, experts say, follow that approach. - The New York Times
“Yes — we have urged Christians, both locally and across the country, to search their libraries for books that promote sodomy, gender confusion and rebellion against God — and if found, to check them out and never return them as an act of civil disobedience." - News from the States
People carving their initials into the Coliseum, trashing Bernini’s fountain in Rome, driving a car down the Spanish Steps, mounting and humping a nude statue of Bacchus, causing all kinds of damage taking selfies. National ministries pass the buck to each other, leaving local governments to clean up the messes. - Artnet
