In a lawsuit filed in California, attorneys representing Durst, Limp Bizkit and Flawless Records accused UMG of using software “deliberately designed to conceal artists’ (including Plaintiffs’) royalties” so it can pocket the profits. - The Guardian
Homes filled to the rafters with hoarded junk are common enough to have an ironic idiom: gomi-yashiki (trash-mansions). And in areas where space is limited, cluttered residences and shops will often erupt, disgorging things onto the street in a semi-controlled jumble so ubiquitous that urban planners have a name for it: afuré-dashi (spilling-outs). - Aeon
Bjarne Melgaard, whose career soared in the 2010s, developed some very ill-advised habits (including crystal meth) and ran up big debts. Two investors gave him roughly $10 million in this Faustian deal — with a contract Melgaard says he was too drunk to understand at the time. - The New York Times
The emotional and psychological ties people have with places contribute to their perception of authenticity. Just as much as the exposed bricks and wooden floors, it’s because of its community connections and personalised atmosphere that a centuries-old pub in London can feel more authentic than a commercialised pub in the United States. - Psyche
"The rising young generations want texts that matter to them, that reflect their lives and experiences. So when we force-feed yet another vanilla canonical dust collector, and then complain that they aren’t playing along, it’s just not a good look for us." - CMSThomas
Walker, who has been a board member of the National Gallery since 2019, is perhaps best known for his 11-year tenure at the helm of one of the nation’s largest and most influential philanthropies, the Ford Foundation.
"It makes a weird kind of sense that the government worker who understands the value of providing online advice and information to far-flung Americans … is a woman whose hometown is a 32-hour drive from a reference desk in D.C." - The Washington Post
"The new district, named the Edith and Peter O'Donnell Jr. Athenaeum, will have two museums, a performance hall, a music building and an outdoor plaza. The Crow Museum of Asian Art … opened a second location last week on the UT Dallas campus as part of the first phase of the project." - Axios
The designers of the project, the L.A. starchitect firm Morphosis, have abandoned the original plan (around a garden) for a paved pedestrian artery that will be hot most of the year. Morphosis is apparently more interested in cool-looking shapes than a building that suits its purpose. - The Dallas Morning News (MSN)
"For the first time, internal TikTok communications have been made public that show a company unconcerned with the harms the app poses for American teenagers. This is despite its own research validating many child safety concerns." - NPR
"The attempted murder trial of (Hadi Matar,) the man charged with severely injuring author Salman Rushdie in a 2022 knife attack was put on hold Friday while judges consider a request to move it to another county. Jury selection had been scheduled to start on Tuesday." - AP
"The time it is taking us to bring our services back is an exact measure of the destructiveness of the original attack, which directly targeted our core computing infrastructure," said CEO Roly Keating. The estimated cost of the incident is £1.6 million ($2.09 million). - ARTnews
The story they want to tell, in an emphatically triumphalist tone, is that the early pirates were David and the music industry was Goliath. But then the industry realized that David was actually pretty cool: All turned out well, and music was solved forever. - The New York Times
The show has struggled to sell enough tickets to defray its running costs, and on Friday night the producers announced that it would close on Jan. 5. At the time of its closing, it will have had 24 previews and 301 regular performances. The show announced plans for a national tour in September 2025. - NY Times
Scientists found that bilingual individuals have more efficient communication between brain regions, notably between the cerebellum and left frontal cortex. - Neuroscience News
