Stories

When A Sports Venue Demands Hundreds Of Millions Of Dollars From Governments, We Need To Know About Its Architecture

“The Moda Center has always been a candidate for upgraded design. Which is to say nothing of the 30-acre Rose Quarter property the arena is part of: an unequivocal urban-planning disaster. … The Rose Quarter needs radical reconstructive surgery even more than the arena.” - Oregon ArtsWatch

The Guys Who Got Fired From The Han Solo Movie Took Some Lessons Into Project Hail Mary

For one thing, they met some of the Hail Mary crew on Solo. "We met Neal Scanlan and the creature shop team that we worked with to make Rocky, for example. We had such a great experience with them, making these aliens and robots together.” - The New York Times

Trump Has Columbus Status Installed On The White House Grounds

It’s “is a replica of one that protesters in Baltimore tore down and dumped into the city’s Inner Harbor in the summer of 2020. The statue’s marble pieces were retrieved from the harbor, and a Maryland artist used them to guide the creation of the replica." - The New York Times

What Can A Movie Teach Us About Resisting AI With Performance?

“Plato decried the falsity of imitation of real life—called ‘mimesis’—specifically in the arts. ... What makes you ‘you’ or the world the ‘world’ if artists can just depict a facsimile and receive recognition from an audience?” - The Defector

Israel May Be Considering Banning Artist Rama Duwaji, First Lady Of New York

“The ministry reportedly took issue with Duwaji’s animation Eyes on Jenin (2025), a work that linked police brutality against pro-Palestinian protesters to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.” - Hyperallergic

A New Way To Consume What’s Euphemistically Known As ‘Kissing’ Books

"Quinn finds the guys (mostly guys) in television shows whose characters people fantasize about. It pays those guys to read original scripts that have explicit sex in them—often, as with Ember & Ice, stories that vaguely echo the original source material that the actor became famous for.” - Slate

The Artist Who Dropped Out Of Art School Three Credits Shy In Order To Become A Rock And Roll Star

“Music wasn't something that was going to be a long-term thing. ‘I remember distinctly begging my mom for X amount of dollars to buy a certain drum kit and I was like, 'Mom, I'm not going to be in a rock band when I'm 30.’” - CBC

A Tennessee Library Director Refuses To Move LGBTQ Books, Citing The First Amendment

"The Rutherford County Library Board voted ... to relocate more than 190 books, many involving LGBTQ+ themes, from children’s and teen sections to adult areas following a review of ‘age-appropriate’ materials” - and the library director refused.- The Advocate

A Jury Says Elon Musk Drove Down Twitter’s Price And Defrauded Investors With Misleading Statements

One of those statements was Musk “tweeting a poop emoji when then-Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal commented there was no way for external parties to calculate this information.” - Courthouse News

California’s Film And TV Tax Credit Is Working, But The State Says The Business Needs More Help

Will this argument play? "Whether it is computer chips, the energy sector or pharmaceuticals, this is something that is standard in the United States. … In terms of our nation, Hollywood and its ability to tell the story of America, it is something worth saving.” - Los Angeles Times (MSN)

The HarperCollins Union Has Finally Ratified Its New Contract

Not like it’s making any worker rich (check the numbers), but at least they didn’t have to strike this time. “HarperCollins employees have had a union for over 80 years, and are currently the only major publisher in the US with a union.” - LitHub

Game Developers Use AI For A Lot Of Things, But Not Creating Games

This feels like good news for creators: “‘I feel like the human mind is so beautiful,’ The Melty Way developer Gabriel Paquette told me. ‘Why not use it?’” (Archive Today link) - The Verge

The Navy Veteran Who Titles His Paintings After Octavia Butler And Dostoyevsky

“'You do four years in the Navy, and you see a lot of blue water,’ said Price, standing in his studio in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn.” - The New York Times

Musicians On The Greatness And Legacy Of Alice Coltrane

In just one example, "as the American composer Adrian Younge says: ‘Alice Coltrane took the harp, an instrument of angels and orchestras, and made it sound like the cosmos breathing.’” - The Guardian (UK)

What’s The Impact Of The US Dismantling Storied, Award-Winning Black Studies Departments?s

“Early investment in race and gender studies ‘favored programs over departments,’ which has always made financing a tenuous proposition. And at the end of the day, even the highest minded universities stay beholden to bottom lines and trustees.” - LitHub

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