"Unlike its streamlined, efficient former self, Google Search is now bloated and overmonetized. It's harder now to find answers that feel authoritative or uncompromised. … Using Google once felt like magic, and now it’s more like rifling through junk mail, dodging scams and generic mailers." - MSN (The Atlantic)
Perhaps chopping prose into tokens is not how I would like to be read. But then, who am I to say what my work is good for, how it might benefit someone—even a near-trillion-dollar company? - The Atlantic
"'I just don’t have any more choreographic ideas,' she said. She went on to describe dancing Trio A in her 80s, when getting up off the ground had become more difficult, and wondering to herself, 'Why isn’t this way of getting up just as good as the original?'" - Art in America
The building represents Wright’s decades-long fascination with a concept he called the “New Theatre.” It involved eschewing the traditional setup, with a proscenium stage—in which audiences stare straight ahead with a single, framed view—and instead creating a circular, revolving stage that joined the actors and audience in a more unified space. - Texas Monthly
How the Barter Theatre in rural southwestern Virginia, Signature Theatre in metro DC, Milwaukee Repertory Theater, and TheatreSquared in Fayetteville, Arkansas kept up contact and engagement with their communities through the lockdowns and afterward. - AP
"LaFontaine Oliver, New York Public Radio's president and chief executive, said in a memo to employees that a 'free fall in the advertising market' had led to the decision to cut staff." - The New York Times
"A sacred tablet that was stolen by British troops during the 1868 Battle of Maqdala in Ethiopia was restituted in a service at a church in London on Monday. Also known as a tabot, the object is a symbolic representation of the Ark of the Covenant for the Ethiopian church." - ARTnews
Fred Kaplan, defense columnist for Slate: "When pressed with an even mildly confounding question, the machine just makes stuff up. Which makes me wonder: how will it learn how to write good literature, useful technical manuals, entertaining joke books, or anything else that anyone might want to read?" - MSN (Slate)
Alex Reisner has put together a searchable database of the volumes that Mark Zuckerberg's tech colossus used, without permission, to train LLaMA, its generative AI program — the subject of three different copyright lawsuits (so far) by authors. - MSN (The Atlantic)
The answer: not everything the writers wanted, but a lot more than anyone thought would be there six months ago — "a deal far richer and more comprehensive than most industry observers would have predicted last spring when the fitful negotiations began." - Variety
"The governing boards of the eastern and western branches of the Writers Guild of America and their joint negotiating committee all voted to accept the deal, two days after the tentative agreement was reached with a coalition of Hollywood’s biggest studios, streaming services and production companies." - AP
Much of the landscape of North America was new to the English, so many early word inventions applied to the natural world. Often these simply combined a noun with an adjective: backcountry, backwoods (and backwoodsman), back settlement, pine barrens, canebrake, salt lick, foothill, underbrush, bottomland, cold snap. - Lapham's Quarterly
In addition to rising costs, topics discussed at the daylong conference included the renewed postpandemic threat of work moving off-shore, sustainability concerns, the shift from offset to digital printing, and labor shortages. - Publishers Weekly
“So when people attend, they engage, they connect and then they give. So when the audience isn’t coming back, isn’t seeing the shows, then they’re not as motivated or connected to make that additional donation.” - Oregon Public Broadcasting
That piece of land is referred to as "the promenade." According to the descendants of Memphis founders, who are referred to as the "heirs" in legal documents, the city should not be building on the property since it belongs to the citizens. - Memphis Commercial Appeal
