One hotel owner: “It could all be a flash in the pan, and that’s fine. If it sticks, that’s also great. What I do know is that I won’t be renaming any rooms as ‘The Jacob Elordi Room’ or ‘The Heathcliff Room.’” - The Guardian (UK)
Yes, Soylent Green is people, and … so is Waymo? “The autonomous vehicle company uses remote workers in the Philippines to assist its self-driving cars, including those operating daily on Bay Area roads.” - San Francisco Chronicle (Yahoo)
Well, at least they bought those books? “This program raised red flags for some inside Anthropic, who knew that tearing books apart to feed into an AI model was rather literally bringing the critiques of these companies to life.” - LitHub
“Woodie, as artistic director and producer, understood and respected the sanctity of the director. … Woodie, even faced with the challenges of inequitable funding for New Federal Theatre, and sometimes no funding at all, always persevered and prevailed.” - American Theatre
Surely it’s a coincidence that as a movie named about the current First Lady opens in the UK, people start watching a movie about Michelle Obama (“a rise in views of more than 13,000%”). - The Guardian (UK)
The man loves reading and writing, basically. “I love Joan Didion, and she once said she journals so that when she gets really old, she can pick up her books and find her way back to herself again.” - CBC
At the halftime show for the Super Bowl, “the stage must be assembled in about eight minutes, using rolling carts equipped with pneumatic tires. The field … can hold only so much additional weight. After the 12-minute performance, the stage must be torn down quickly.” - The New York Times
“I was left with a feeling of tremendous shame. Even after gathering the courage to speak up, I was ashamed that I was a victim, ashamed that I was unable to stop it. Ashamed that even after finally speaking up, I was disregarded, ignored, discarded.” - Toronto Star
City officials in Fujiyoshida, not far from Mount Fuji, said residents had been littering, entering private homes to use the bathroom, and even defecating in people’s yards and getting belligerent when confronted. The weeks-long event had attracted about 200,000 visitors each year for the past decade. - The Guardian
The typewriter, from its birth, has been tied to a set of assumptions about gender and skill. These assumptions persist to the present and color our cultural understanding of typists’ labor. - Public Domain Review
“Today, (after almost four years in New York,) the musical is still packing in crowds, a feat for a show that isn’t a revival or a movie adaptation and lacks big stars or Tony wins. It’s ... one of only four new musicals since the pandemic to recoup their investments.” - Variety
The exit, announced Monday, Feb. 2, comes just days after Mayor Daniel Lurie posted a job description for an executive director of arts and culture to oversee all three of the city's arts agencies, which includes Grants for the Arts and the Film Commission, in addition to SFAC. - San Francisco Chronicle (Yahoo)
What’s even fascinating is what this whole debacle tells us about the MAGA movement as a whole, and how Trump is the perfect symbol for their failed culture war aspirations. - Salon
To many Philadelphians who having been coming daily ever since to leave protest messages, it felt like an attack on a hard-won monument, and even on the city itself. Within hours of the removal, the city filed a lawsuit in federal court contesting it. - The New York Times
