"Introduced in 2003 by then culture minister Jean-Jacques Aillagon, this policy incentivises corporate philanthropy for arts and charities by offering a 60 per cent tax relief on donations, capped at 0.5 per cent of a company’s annual turnover. The law has transformed France’s cultural funding." - Financial Times
"The Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter and children’s book author was one of the most humorously neurotic literary voices of his generation. … (He) found his voice in comics that provided a sardonic and sarcastic takedown of authority and conventional wisdom." - The Washington Post (MSN)
Haven’t critics freaked out about the brain-scrambling power of everything from pianofortes to brightly colored posters? Isn’t there, in fact, a long section in Plato’s Phaedrus in which Socrates argues that writing will wreck people’s memories? - The New Yorker
“It’s not really enjoyable to make music now. It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. And I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music." - Music Radar
Los Angeles is facing a loss of artists, producers and executives ranging from sound to visual effects. Musicians, and the players behind them, are a vital aspect in that. - The Hollywood Reporter
Is it inherently bad to cater to people who may prefer their viewing on the more casual side? Is it snobbery to believe that TV must demand all of our attention all of the time? - The Guardian
Classical music has long been wandering in the desert of its own identity crisis, and 2016 was an unexpected checkpoint. Overnight, it seemed that artists had sprung into creative overdrive, making works to comment on the moment - Van
About 63 percent of us read at least one book last year, an improvement from the 54 percent we saw in 2023.Other sources don’t point to a seismic shift in reading habits, so this may be a refined estimate rather than a trend. - Washington Post
“The main takeaway from this study is that LLMs, while impressive, still lack the depth of understanding required for advanced history. They’re great for basic facts, but when it comes to more nuanced, PhD-level historical inquiry, they’re not yet up to the task." - TechCrunch
Broadly, Project Liberty is part of the movement toward a decentralized social Internet, where no single network controls users’ data and users can instead move their online identities and communities from one network to another without having to start from scratch. - The New Yorker
But not everyone agrees. “Workers at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema collected just over 1,000 signatures in an ongoing petition requesting the theatre chain pull the film. ... The petition cites the film as being complicit in "manufacturing consent" for actions taken against Palestinian people.” - CBC
"Now 56, she is fresh off a Golden Globe nomination for her performance as Babe Paley in Feud: Capote vs. the Swans. In March, she’ll star in the movie The Friend,” and she also has a new book coming out. - The New York Times
The choreographer of exuberant musicals said, “My goal as a dancer and choreographer is to be understood. … Dance should not be a cerebral experience that the dancers have and the audiences watch. I want dancers to communicate something and have the audience receive the same thing.” - The New York Times
No, this is not The Onion: “A group of Bradford City fans will go from singing on the terraces to performing as a choir for a BBC programme called ‘Bantam of the Opera.’”- BBC
The continent doesn’t need the West to “discover” writers. Instead, “a radical shift is underway, transforming the region’s literary landscape from within and opening up possibilities unimaginable to previous generations of writers.” - The New York Times
