“The British street artist’s identity has been debated, and closely guarded, for decades. A quest to solve the riddle took Reuters from a bombed-out Ukrainian village to London and downtown Manhattan — and uncovered much more than a name.” - Reuters
Caelainn Hogan: “I am a freelance writer who, like most artists, has always had to work outside my creative focus to afford to live. ... As such, the basic income was life-changing. Only months into the scheme, I found out I was pregnant.” - The Guardian
“The 1850 daguerreotypes, a precursor to modern-day photographs, are of an enslaved man named Renty, his daughter Delia and five others known as Jack, Drana, Alfred, Fassena and Jem. … Harvard University turned the photos over to the International African-American Museum in Charleston after a seven-year legal fight.” - AP
Next season, 2026-27, will be the last for both the Boston Philharmonic and its associated youth orchestra. The identity of the organization is thoroughly bound to that of Zander, the conductor who founded both ensembles and is now 87. - Boston Classical Review
In response to a statement to The Boston Globe by GBH’s CEO proposing a merger, WBUR CEO Susan Low said that she and the station’s board have “very closely” examined the idea but that “WBUR and GBH are also very different organizations. And we believe the community benefits from that.” - WBUR (Boston)
The CEO of GBH, which operates one of the U.S.’s leading PBS television stations as well as a public radio outlet, says that merging with WBUR would end competition for donors and more efficiently utilize resources in the wake of federal defunding of public broadcasting. - The Boston Globe
The climate crisis has caused devastated cacao farming in West Africa, causing huge price spikes and volatility in the cocoa commodity market — leading companies like Hershey’s and Cadbury, which manufacture inexpensive chocolate products for ordinary consumers, to start using other ingredients. - The Guardian
By some measures, there are as many as 1 million books published annually in the US, and it’s a number that doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. The result is that there is intense competition for the small slice of the review landscape that remains. - Book Work
Every year, over 400 church organs in the UK alone are sent to the junkyard or become unplayable due to neglect. The organization Pipe Up is rescuing some of those instruments which can be made playable at relatively little expense, then sending them to new owners ranging from London to the Philippines. - BBC (Yahoo!)
Combining machine learning, deep neural networks and computer vision algorithms, Art Recognition’s approach can, in theory, be adapted to any painter with a big enough back catalog. To date, the company has produced models for more than 200 artists. - CNN
The recovery, however, came with an asterisk. While auctions bounced back strongly, galleries barely budged, and much of the market’s growth came from a small number of very expensive works. - ARTnews
According to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in the summer of 2025, 53% of U.S. adults said they had seen a movie in theaters in the prior 12 months. A small but notable 7% said they had never seen a movie in a theater at all. - Variety
“A lost page from the Archimedes Palimpsest, among the oldest sources for the Greek mathematician in existence, has been discovered … at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Blois. The page in question contains geometric diagrams and a passage from Archimedes’s treatise on the sphere and the cylinder, hidden beneath a layer of later religious writings.” - Artnet
Whatever their mission and wherever their location, what the stations have in common is the amplification — literally and metaphorically — of women’s voices to create a community that might not otherwise exist, on-air or off. - NiemanLab
Nearly every major pianist of the early 20th century made music for these machines. Echoing AI commentary today, some musicians viewed the player piano as not just replicating human playing, but exceeding it. - The Atlantic
