Stories

Russell Brand Convicted Of Rape And Sexual Assault

The British actor-comedian was convicted of one count of rape and three counts of sexual assault involving four women. He was acquitted of two rape counts and one count of attempted indecent assault. The incidents happened more than 20 years ago. - AP

Art Dealer Brent Sikkema’s Ex-Husband Sentenced To Life In Prison For His Murder

“Daniel Sikkema was found guilty in May of charges tied to a murder-for-hire plot ... that took place in Rio de Janeiro in January 2024. After a two-week trial in New York, Daniel was convicted of three charges: murder-for-hire, conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire, and conspiracy to commit murder in a foreign country.” - ARTnews

How The Various US TV Networks Covered The “Blue Tsunami”: Analysis

“The networks were following the same returns, and by the end of the evening, the same political story was taking shape. What differed was how they told it — and how quickly they moved from counting votes to explaining what went wrong for Republicans and what comes next for Democrats.” - TheWrap (Yahoo!)

China Miéville’s “The Rouse” Wins UK’s Goldsmiths Prize For Innovative Fiction

The win of the £10,000 award makes The Rouse the longest novel to take the prize since it was launched in 2013 for fiction that “breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form.” - The Guardian

Conductor Herbert Blomstedt, 99

Over his seven-decade career, he was music director or principal conductor of the flagship orchestras in Oslo, Danish and Swedish Radio, Dresden, San Francisco, and Leipzig — then spent his 80s and 90s as a surprisingly energetic and much-beloved guest conductor all over Europe, the US, and East Asia. - NPR

2,800-Year-Old Bone Flute Discovered In Ruins Of Troy

The relic is the first musical instrument found at the site in 156 years of excavations. - Smithsonian Magazine

After 20 Years, “Spring Awakening” Creators’ Second Musical Is Finally Making Its Mark

With their Broadway debut a smash hit, Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik expected their next musical, Nero (about the Roman emperor), would go far But, after a 2006 production in San Francisco, the piece got nothing more than workshops and showcases for producers. At long last, Nero is having its London premiere. - The Guardian

Defining The Artificial State

We have not a single piece of meaningful legislation in the United States Congress about artificial intelligence. We have essentially nothing about social media. This is something that we’re now battling out in the courts.  - The Walrus

The Telephone’s Role In Changing Intimacy

This may strike you as a little paranoid. The rise of the telephone, in the past century and a half—from the rotary diallers at home and the boxes in the street to the smartphones in every pocket—is associated with a change that, broadly speaking, we consider positive. - The New Yorker

Physical Witness Becomes More Important In The Age Of AI

For a time, the photograph or moving image acquired its own evidential authority: seeing something recorded was, with reasonable caveats, grounds for accepting that an event had occurred. - The Conversation

Previously Unseen Writing By Harry Houdini Is Published

“Houdini, whose real name was Eric Weisz, was a prolific author, with more than two dozen books, short stories and plays to his name. One of them, an article titled ‘An Interesting Scrapbook,’ ... appears for the first time in print on Saturday” — the centennial of his death — “in Strand magazine.” - The Guardian

Virginia, DC, Sue To Stop Construction Of Trump’s Arch

The 45-page lawsuit in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia called the project "flagrantly unlawful," attorneys general Jay Jones of Virginia and Brian Schwalb of the District of Columbia wrote. - NPR

Naming That Sense Of Civic Disconnect Of Values

How do we give shape to this disquiet? We might call it fatigue, burnout, or ‘just needing a break from the world’, but often it’s grief – mourning for a faith we once had in fellow citizens to recognise a certain decency or sense of fairness. It isn’t partisan; it’s human, and it has a name. - Psyche

How One Dancer Brought Ballet To A Post-Industrial English Town

In the early years, Darius James said he would cover the word "ballet" on the van they took to do community workshops because he feared it would put people off before trying. - BBC

Federico García Lorca Has Finally Become A Queer Icon In Spain Itself

While the Anglosphere has long seen the poet-playwright as a gay icon, that side of his life and work was for decades suppressed within his homeland. Any scholar who dared discuss the subject would be denied access to the family archives (and likely harassed by the Franco regime). That has finally changed. - The Guardian

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