Brand partnerships saw the Deadpool and Wolverine characters shilling for everything from Xbox and Heineken, to Adidas, Aviation Gin (natch), Old Spice, DiGiornio pizzas, and more. - Fast Company
Google isn’t making things up when it says the AI hosts will “banter” with each other, either. When trying out Audio Overview for myself, I plugged in one of the sample notebooks about the invention of the lightbulb, and the results were... a bit uncanny. - The Verge
Often the adaptation is in the style of a radio play, with sound design providing context for the original's dialogue. Sometimes the original visuals are replaced with newly-written narration. dialogue read by actors. In any case, a job which seemed near-impossible to audio publishers 20 years ago is becoming commonplace. - Publishers Weekly
Historically, eugenics and racism have operated in tandem, but neither is reducible to the other. Eugenics attributes socioeconomic inequality—both within and between racially defined groups—to varying levels of intelligence, which it defines as a biological quality shaped largely by our DNA. - LA Review of Books
“We will extend our minds many millions-fold by 2045,” writes Kurzweil. “We are finally getting to the steep part of a fifty-year-old exponential trend…. Humanity’s millennia-long march toward the Singularity has become a sprint.” - The New Republic
As Wikipedia’s visibility diminishes, reduced to mere training data for AI applications, it also loses prominence in the minds of readers and potential contributors. - The Guardian
"There’s a reason, aside from name recognition, that they keep coming back. Though products of vastly different times and cultures, they dig so deep into their specific truths that they reach a common, eternal one, from which many others may spring." - The New York Times
For most groups, the proportion of their budgets coming from earned income (mostly ticket sales) has fallen by a third to a half from 2012 levels (let alone the levels of the 1990s). With the trend of philanthropy turning away from the arts, the outlook in the city appears grim. - Urban Milwaukee
For a decade until 2019, local lawmakers kept Indy Arts Council's budget stagnant at $1 million, and there were only small increases and some federal money added during the pandemic. From that budget, over 100 organizations must share grants. So IAC is requesting a budget increase from $1.3 million to $3 million. - WFYI (Indianapolis)
For most of the past 40 years, teachers told the 59-year-old Mexican composer her works were too exotic. Critics found it too big and messy. Major orchestras ignored her when giving commissions. Now, thanks to some major breaks, especially from Gustavo Dudamel, she's hit the big time. - The New York Times
"Microsoft Gaming will lay off approximately 650 employees, or 3% of the Xbox owner’s global workforce, in a new round of eliminations following last year’s completion of its Activision Blizzard acquisition." - Variety
"Visitors to Carcassonne in south-western France will be able to walk a full 1.3 km circuit of its upper ramparts — the first time this has been possible in centuries. The route has been opened up thanks to a 31-month, €5.6m restoration programme by the national heritage agency." - The Art Newspaper
One of director Chris Marney's plans is to spend considerable effort and time touring regional Britain, where ballet companies rarely appear. "What we're finding on the road," he says, "is that audiences want it and audiences are coming to see us." - BBC
Juilliard announced on Wednesday that it had received a $15 million gift to help expand creative work across music, dance and drama. An additional $5 million gift will go to the school’s jazz program to support scholarships, performances and teaching. - The New York Times
In certain bodies, to write about yourself at all is already to be pathologized. But there’s a difference between creative work conferring self-knowledge on a par with psychiatric insight and structuring that work to shore up the psychiatric diagnosis or breakthrough. - The Walrus
