Stories

New Test Of AI Ability Shows AI Beats Humans In A Variety Of Tasks

For GPT-5-high, a souped-up version of GPT-5 with extra computational power, the company says the AI model was ranked as better than or on par with industry experts 40.6% of the time. - TechCrunch

New York Public Radio Offers Free Programming To Other Public Radio Stations Deemed “At Risk”

The Station-to-Station Programming Project will waive distribution fees for programs produced or syndicated by NYPR — among them Radiolab, The New Yorker Radio Hour, Freakonomics Radio and Science Friday — to stations which had received 10% or more of their budgets from the soon-to-close Corporation for Public Broadcasting. - Inside Radio

Venice’s Opera House Appoints New Music Director; Musicians And Staff Revolt

This week the management of Teatro La Fenice, evidently at short notice, named as music director the 35-year-old conductor Beatrice Venezi, reportedly an associate of Prime Minister Georgia Meloni. In response, the musicians and staffers have refused to recognize Venezi and demanded withdrawal of her appointment. - ANSA English (Italy)

Corporation For Public Broadcasting Makes Its Final Grants To Local Stations Before Shutting Down

The $7.1 million being distributed is left over from the previous year’s pool of grant money; it had been allocated for grants which, in the end, weren’t awarded or were returned. If the CPB weren’t closing, that money would normally have been rolled over into the following year’s pool. - Inside Radio

Crowd Of Log Cabin Republicans Show Up To Heckle Guitarist At Kennedy Center

Yasmin Williams, whose email to new Kennedy Center president Ric Grenell got a notoriously vicious response, performed there last week. Shortly before curtain, she and staffers learned that Grenell’s office had reserved 50 tickets for members of the gay Republican group; they booed and hackled for 15 minutes before moving elsewhere. - Washingtonian

Newly-Discovered John Singer Sargent Portrait On View At Paris’s Musée d’Orsay

The striking 1882 portrait Madame O’Connor reveals how Sargent was already experimenting with some of the same styling ideas that would go on to define his most notorious work, Madame X. - Artnet

For The First Time In 53 Years, Manhattan Theater Club Has A New Artistic Director

On December 1, Nicki Hunter, who’s currently the company’s associate artistic director, will take the helm from Lynne Meadow, who grew MTC from a small Off-Off Broadway theater to a major institution with one Broadway and two Off-Broadway houses, 31 Tony Awards and seven Pulitzer Prizes. - The Hollywood Reporter

Jacob’s Pillow To Present Its First-Ever Fall Performances

Just months after most of the flagship summer festival was cancelled following the workplace death of a crew member, the dance mecca is hosting a program in October in the rebuilt Doris Duke Theatre: a weekend of tap by Caleb Teicher and Nic Gareiss. - The Berkshire Eagle (Pittsfield, MA)

Lear deBessonet’s Number-One Goal For Lincoln Center Theater

“The work we make here I want it to be something that anyone of any background — whether they are visiting New York City or were born here — could come in and feel restored to humanity, feel connected to other people. … I really believe it’s a place where we can gather across difference.” - AP

Poll: More Americans Prefer To See New Movies By Streaming Than In Theatres

About three-quarters of U.S. adults said they watched a new movie on streaming instead of in the theater at least once in the past year, according to the survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, including about 3 in 10 who watched new movies on streaming at least once a month. - APNews

Indie Filmmaker Henry Jaglom Dead At 87

As one biographical blurb put it, “Hailed by some as a cinematic genius, a feminist voice and the only true maverick of American cinema, dismissed by others as a voyeuristic, egomaniacal fraud.” But the deeply personal cinéma verité style he developed in his stream of consciousness pictures certainly had its supporters. - Variety

What’s Ari Shapiro Doing Next After Leaving NPR? He Honestly Does Not Know

“There’s no big reveal. Maybe the reason people just assume that there’s some big next thing is that they can’t imagine that you would give up hosting All Things Considered unless it was to grab another shiny gold ring, because that’s kind of been my whole life.” - Vulture (MSN)

How To Test Whether An Argument Is Valid

An argument is essentially a collection of sentences. One of the sentences is the ‘conclusion’, and all the rest are the ‘premises’. The conclusion is meant to follow from the premises. But what exactly does that mean? - Psyche

What Propelled The Rise Of Civilization? War

Ultrasociality was the secret of survival in this perpetual arms race, making it the ultimate military technology — or war the ultimate social technology. - Nature

The Movie Hospital — Where Damaged Movies Go To Be Reborn

Resurrection, as often as not, means restoration, and one of the festival’s many missions is to showcase, and to explore, the painstaking ways in which wounded films can be healed. Basically, if movies were people, whether foreign or Italian-born, Bologna is where they would choose to live. - The New Yorker

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