The British investment firm Baillie Gifford became lead sponsor of the Hay Festival in 2015, but this year a number of the marquee participants at high-profile events canceled their appearances over what they see as Baillie Gifford's excessive ties to the fossil-fuel industry and the Israeli government. - The Guardian
"Freshly under interim leadership, the Metro Arts Commission would receive $5.5 million, … on par with last year's budget. … The release of these dollars is contingent on two things: The commission must submit an annual report on the grant recipients, and Metro Council must approve the commission's award criteria." - The Tennessean (MSN)
Daniel Singh, who, over two years as director of the agency Metro Arts, alienated many staff members and presided over an extremely messy round of grant-awarding this past year, accepted a negotiated settlement the night before the Metro Arts Commission met to consider firing him. - Nashville Banner
"For every dollar the symphony spends, it generates about $4 in the local economy, leading to a total of $125 million in regional impact for (FY2023-24). Plus, the symphony, which operates with a budget of about $33 million, helps sustain about 1,900 jobs in the region annually." - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"Brett Callow, a threat analyst at Esmisoft, a cybersecurity firm based in New Zealand, posted on X an image of a post from (the website of cybercriminal gang) RansomHub with a blurred sample of some of the information contained in the trove." - Artnet
"The scarred and gifted son of founding Beat Lucien Carr, (he) endured a traumatizing childhood and became a bestselling novelist, accomplished military historian and late-life memoirist of his devoted cat, Masha." - AP
The top prize went to Sean Baker's "sex worker screwball comedy" Anora; the Grand Prix went to Payal Kapadia's All We Imagine As Light, the first Indian film in competition in 30 years. A special jury prize went to The Seed of the Sacred Fig by Mohammad Rasoulof, who secretly escaped Iran. - France 24
The crowd addicted to slander and the crowd addicted to censorship are displaying at high visibility the symptoms of what psychologists call disinhibition. When people feel themselves entirely at home, with a group they are sure of, they shed the restraints that are useful in securing a minimal self-censorship in mixed or uncertain company. - Compact Magazine
“Rey says that instead of eating enough and regularly I have been particularly sustaining myself with coffee and alcohol. I admit all that, but it will still be true that I had to key myself up a bit to reach the high yellow note I reached this summer.” - The Art Newspaper
To reach affected audiences, the Tribune printed 500 flyers and 1,000 postcards in English and Spanish. Journalists knocked on doors in the neighborhoods where they’d reported and made additional stops in school pick-up lines, churches, grocery stores, laundromats, and other spots where residents gather. - NiemanLab
The prize was established in 1988, initially as a biannual event, and was then awarded every year from 2007, other than in 2020 due to Covid lockdowns. But the prize was not given out in 2023, though no announcement was made that it had been cancelled, and it will not reappear in 2024. - The Guardian
“We’re still here,” Adam Aron says of Kansas-based AMC, which operates 895 theaters globally. “When you think about what we’ve been through the past four years, it’s kind of a miracle. It could have gone kaplooey 10 times, but it didn’t. And good for us. We’re almost finally through it.” - Variety
The bread scent comes from microcapsules embedded in the ink. The major challenge was to get the ink onto the stamps without breaking those microcapsules before customers ever got to sniff them. - Dezeen
Social platforms can have a radicalizing effect on fandoms. When we study algorithmic radicalization, we tend to do so in the context of politics, but the same systems might also calcify our beliefs about cultural products. Yet we still have a fairly limited understanding of how all of this works. - The Atlantic
