In its first decade, Pandora users had created eight billion stations, logged 74 billion hours of listening, and rated 55 billion songs with its signature thumbs up and down buttons. - Fast Company
Gaudí’s structure is a head-spinning mixture of morphing geometrical forms, many inspired by nature. Its conical Art Nouveau pinnacles have the lumpy beauty of sandcastles. Building such an unusual church has been a famously slow project, even in a country where, to American eyes, many things move without haste. - The New Yorker
“If we lose the radio station, it’s like you lose an arm or a leg,” said the tribal council vice-chair in Warm Springs, Oregon. Said a co-host at KILI on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation, “We are barely surviving as a people. We don’t have the option of a GoFundMe.” - The New York Times
“(Five members) were sentenced to periods ranging from 8 to 13 years for ‘spreading knowingly false information containing data about the deployment of the Russian Armed Forces,’ according to the court. The case centers the collective’s 2022 antiwar video that opens with the phrase, ‘the howls of Mariupol.’” - ARTnews
“Libraries, and public libraries in particular, are often in financial crunches and depend on tax dollars to keep the lights on. They rarely have the resources to defend against lawsuits on their own.” Here are stories of three attorneys and the cases they fought. - Publishers Weekly
The case, with Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment as lead plaintiffs, targeted the Archive's Great 78 Project, an initiative to digitize, and make available for free online, more than 400,000 fragile shellac recordings made before the arrival of vinyl records in 1948. The labels sought damages for copyright infringement. - Rolling Stone (MSN)
The state’s far-flung public radio stations are among the most vulnerable to the rescission of federal funding. The legislature has eliminated state funding as well, and many of these stations serve communities too small and isolated for local fundraising. The Voices Across Alaska Fund aims to make up the difference. - Anchorage Daily News
“CEO Katherine Maher announced during a board meeting that while listener donations have surged (since the elimination of federal funding for public broadcasting), it’s unclear how long this generosity will last or how severely local NPR member stations will be affected.” - Inside Radio
“A break-in was detected on Tuesday morning, with the intruders reportedly using an angle grinder and a blow torch to force their way into the riverside complex. … The stolen specimens are valued at around 600,000 euros based on the price of raw gold.” - France 24
Marianna Brilla and Lisa Paglin spent years in Italy studying old vocal treatises and historical recordings to find the roots of bel canto technique. Now they run the New Voice Studio, where they combat the opera world’s obsession with power and volume, teaching instead “spontaneity, beauty, and freedom.” - El País (Spain) (in English)
“This is who the Fifth Circuit is harassing: a mom of four with a Diet Coke in her hand, doing this while her kids are at school. This fight is everyone’s—it belongs to every individual American.” - Publishers Weekly
Before Lebanon’s long civil war, authors from all over the Arab world published in liberal Beirut the books they couldn’t release in their own countries. Now, decades of conflict in Lebanon have led to both government censorship and self-censorship, while bookstores and readers cope with prolonged political and financial crises. - New Lines Magazine
Some estimate that the city’s subterranean history could stretch back 1 million years, with early human settlement from the Lantian Man and walled settlements already visible during the Yangshao period 7,000 years ago. - Artnet
They have brothers and fathers in the war; they have family members cut off from them in the occupied Donbas. At one rehearsal, an actress apologized for being late; she had just heard that a friend from drama school had been killed at the front. - The New York Times
Over more than a decade with Lines, Cissoko has become such a part of King's creative process that it's now almost impossible to know the dancer from the dance, as the poet Yeats put it. - San Francisco Chronicle (MSN)
