The tyranny of choice can make the comparatively limited days of the in-car CD player, or multi-disc changer, if you were fancy, seem highly attractive. Hold on to them if you’ve got them: from now on, car manufacturers in the UK will no longer include CD players on new models. - The Guardian
"In the midst of all this, what does it mean to be a writer trying to write in the way that I want to write? What would the new technologies mean for writers like Saul Bellow or Philip Roth, who I adore, and for the richness of their language?" - The Atlantic
The major studios wouldn’t touch “Megalopolis,” the ambitious passion project from octogenarian Oscar-winner Francis Ford Coppola. Now it’s clear why. - Los Angeles Times
CEO Sadie Lythcott says, "Our artistic ambition was always stifled by the space that we had." Come 2027, NBT will move into a block-long complex with two theaters, a set-building shop and affordable artist housing, all on 125th Street in Harlem. - The Guardian
The downside of these machine-learned embeddings is that, unlike in a game of 20 Questions, many of the descriptions encoded in each list of numbers are not interpretable by humans. - The Atlantic
Figures from the arts include poet Jericho Brown, violinist Johnny Gandelsman, media artist Tony Cokes, filmmaker Sterlin Harjo, cabaret artist Justin Vivian Bond, writers Juan Felipe Herrera and Ling Ma, multimedia artist Ebony G. Patterson, choreographer Shamel Pitts, visual artist Wendy Red Star, and young people's lit author Jason Reynolds. - NPR
Disney's America was intended to have nine sections, from a Colonial-era Presidents Square and an Indigenous village to Ellis Island and a 19th-century factory town to a Civil War fort and a Depression-era family farm. But, for example, Ellis Island was going to have Muppets. - The Conversation
Emma Portner is now almost 30, and the National Ballet of Canada has brought a major work of hers on tour to London. Yet the piece which really established her career, and which still gets her engagements, is a 3½-minute video to a Bruce Springsteen cover. - The Guardian
"(Management) has invited the problem at least partially by asking audiences to ... engage with their cell phones during visits. Tagging the ensemble on social media has long been encouraged. Signs at one recent performance asked patrons to bypass printed programs and instead read their program notes online." - The Philadelphia Inquirer (MSN)
Pantsula is a dance style developed in the country's black townships by Africans who combined the tap dancing they saw in American movies with traditional movement. Vusi Mdoyi grew up doing pantsula and, in 1994, co-founded the company Step Afrika!, which professionalized the form. - The New York Times
Hannah Gutierrez-Reed was convicted of manslaughter for the accidental shooting of the film's cinematographer by star Baldwin, who presumed that a prop gun would not contain live ammunition. After charges against Baldwin were vacated last week, Gutierrez-Reed's attorneys asked that her case be similarly dismissed; they were denied. - The Hollywood Reporter
A junk dealer found the painting when cleaning out a deceased homeowner's basement on the island of Capri. The dealer took it home and hung it (his wife hated it); years later, his son had experts look at it, and they believe it's a portrait of Picasso's erstwhile lover Dora Maar. - The Guardian
Lalovavi, set in the year 2119 and with a score by composer Kevin Day, was to premiere next June but has been postponed one year to 2026 due to delays with Tifara Brown's libretto. The work is the first of three commissioned by the company for its Black Opera Project. - AP
