In contrast to the mess at Dallas Black Dance Theatre last year, when dancers voted to join a union and were promptly fired, leading to a nationally publicized fiasco, the dancers at Texas Ballet Theater, who voted to join AGMA in 2023, have just signed their first contract. - KERA (Dallas)
The author and activist reported on Bluesky last week that her Facebook account on Facebook was suspended, later adding that she was told the decision was permanent. Then the Chronicle reported the ban, and within 24 hours Solnit was reinstated, with a Meta spokesperson saying the suspension was in error. - San Francisco Chronicle (MSN)
“The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization which hosts and develops Wikipedia, has paused an experiment that showed users AI-generated summaries at the top of articles after an overwhelmingly negative reaction from the Wikipedia editors community.” - 404 Media
“Approximately 100 employees were dismissed in a broad ‘reduction in force’ on Tuesday, June 10. … Fewer than 60 staff members remain at the agency, which oversees an annual $207 million budget to support public history, libraries, museums and education programs across the country.” - San Francisco Chronicle (MSN)
“There was an abiding pathos in his best records — not merely the idealized scenes the songs depicted, but also that they were created by a depressed, socially awkward, partially-deaf young man who never surfed or much liked the beach and spent his time alone in his room.” - The Washington Post (MSN)
Khaby Lame, a 25-year-old Senegalese-Italian influencer with 162 million followers on the video app, was detained at Las Vegas airport for (as an ICE spokesperson put it) “overstaying the terms of his visa.” He was allowed to depart the country without being held to wait for a deportation order. - AP
The latest crisis in literary studies feels different: more spiteful and less fertile, more terminally gloomy, a scene of death throes rather than birth pangs. - N+1
Tracy Young: “I’ve seen nothing to counter the notion that Shakespeare was a populist. All about the people, and the audience’s kind of theater guy. … That to me was the real affirmation of why Play on Shakespeare is worthy. I have no complicated feelings about the rightness or wrongness of it.” - TheaterMania
New research builds on a growing understanding that the majority of the brain’s function goes to maintenance. While many neuroscientists have historically focused on active, outward cognition, such as attention, problem-solving, working memory and decision-making, it’s becoming clear that beneath the surface, our background processing is a hidden hive of activity. - Quanta
Taste is a subtle sensibility, more often a secret weapon than a person’s defining characteristic. But we’re entering a time when its importance has never been greater, and that’s because of AI. - The Atlantic
With the sudden closing of Small Press Distribution last year and the impending disappearance of National Book Network, the avenues for small presses in North America to get their books into retail stores have been evaporating. Enter Stable Distribution, a joint venture of Hachette Book Group and the Stable Book Group. - Publishers Weekly
Doechii, the Grammy-winning rapper, and entertainment mogul Tyler Perry made overt statements about the current administration and its multi-pronged attacks on communities of color. - The Contrarian
“The university would run the museum. The details are being worked out. Negotiations are ongoing and a finished agreement is months away with the anticipation to have finalization sometime in the fall.” - CultureOC
“The board directed the secretary to assess content in museums and make needed changes to ensure unbiased content, including personnel changes,” a Smithsonian spokesman said. - The Wall Street Journal
“Ms. Holdridge, along with her best friend, Marianne Mantell, built the label, Caedmon Records, into a recording industry dynamo by releasing LPs of such notable authors and poets as T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, Robert Frost, Eudora Welty, and Ernest Hemingway reading their own words.” - The New York Times
