There were more than 17 billion visits to music piracy websites worldwide last year, a staggering 13 percent increase from 2022, according to research firm Muso. After years of downturn in music piracy brought about by streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music, the uptick is somewhat startling. - Wired
"(Ambulances) didn’t arrive quickly enough to revive the man, who was pronounced dead around 10:45 a.m. local time. Few other details about the fatal plunge were immediately released, including the victim’s name and age." - The Daily Beast
"This new chapter for the Ta Som and Preah Khan Temples, alongside the Churning of the Ocean of Milk Gallery in Angkor Wat, coincides with a new phase of WMF conservation undertakings at Phnom Bakheng." - The Art Newspaper
"As a supplement to more traditional offerings such as one-on-one counseling, support groups or medication, students can now get a referral to attend a concert, take a ceramics lesson or benefit from any campus art offering." - San Francisco Chronicle (MSN)
"San Diego County's arts and culture nonprofit sector generated $1.37 billion in economic activity in 2022. … A parallel study of the city of San Diego's arts nonprofits found that their economic output (was) almost $1.19 billion in 2022." - The San Diego Union-Tribune (MSN)
"Audacy has laid off … a quarter of the staff at (Pineapple Street Studios,) the division that produces shows such as the recent hit Ghost Story and several television-focused series with partners like HBO, Max, and Netflix. … The layoffs come just weeks after Audacy filed for bankruptcy." - Inside Radio
"This year, the museum will sing a song of itself" (the reference is to noted Brooklynite Walt Whitman) "for its 200th anniversary, with a slate of events and exhibitions that includes a major group show of Brooklyn artists and a reinstallation of its American art galleries." - The New York Times
"The bill would make it so that school boards cannot implement policies that intentionally remove or restrict materials in the library or in classrooms that features stories or themes of people under legally protected classes" such as people of color or LGBTQ+ people. - Book Riot
I know why Weyant’s friend protested the dress: It could fuel the fire hose of attention that the glamorous, photogenic, and precocious painter has generated over the last several years for her ultrafast rise in the art world, her staggering secondary market prices, and her personal life. - GQ
If contemporary fiction’s capacity for objectivity and thus critique is threatened by first-personalism, these failures are consolidated, Kornbluh argues, by a broader celebration of “formlessness” that manifests as genre-blurring and “medium swirl.” - LA Review of Books
Academia is a serious place, and it takes itself seriously. But it is also, like Hollywood or Washington, profoundly ridiculous — the kind of symbolically overburdened, sociologically peculiar environment that can only really be understood through satire. Luckily, we have an entire literary subgenre, the campus novel, to fulfill that requirement. - The New York Times
Nihar Malaviya, 49, has been at the helm of Penguin Random House for a year — not enough time to turn a battleship, but enough to make some key decisions that give clues to his outlook and goals. - The New York Times
LEDs have also transformed cultural events involving creative lighting. They’re why stadium shows and EDM festivals look so freaking awesome, to fangirl for a minute, and why even many just-getting-started bands have pretty neat light displays. - The Atlantic
As controversy continues over Michelle Terry, artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe (and able-bodied), casting herself as Shakespeare's only explicitly disabled character, actors with disabilities who have played the role themselves weigh in. - The Guardian
