One in six live music venues closed in the past year, according to figures from the Music Venue Trust. But amid the gloom, there are venues opening, too – albeit with a broader remit than focusing solely on club nights or gigs. - The Guardian
Classics is no longer sleepy. The legacies of ancient Greece and Rome have reemerged as key cultural battlefields fought over by everyone from left-wing scholars to gun rights advocates. - LA Review of Books
Time was the problem, I assumed: There was enough of it; I just wasn’t using it right. Or maybe the problem was my attention span. I couldn’t focus. - Esquire
Speed. That’s what you hear, over and over again, as the real benefit of Gen AI imaging. By eliminating the friction of time-consuming tasks and collaborative translation fails, it lets an idea move swiftly from a creative’s head to something that others can see. - IndieWire
Voice Engine can recreate a person’s voice from a 15-second recording. If you upload a recording of yourself and a paragraph of text, it can read the text using a synthetic voice that sounds like yours. - The New York Times
We talked to a few super-readers, who routinely finish hundreds of books a year, about their habits and goals — and asked them about what tips they have for the rest of us. - Washington Post
Over the last twenty years, the number of independent book publishers has grown by over 21 percent, with independent publishing now making up over 35 percent of the market. For publishers like Borucki, the Pandemic years felt rife with opportunity. - LitHub
Philbrick’s ascent paralleled a historic moment that Artnet writer Eileen Kinsella has called “the financialization of the art market.” Today, art is no longer merely displayed for admiration and pleasure but often tucked away in storage facilities from New York to Hong Kong. - Vanity Fair
For the past 20 years, he has been releasing album after album of songs with the object of producing a result to match nearly anything anybody could think to search for. These include hundreds of songs name-checking celebrities from the very famous to the much less so. - The New York Times
“Every 1.3 to 1.5 seconds you have to have a new graphic or something moving, you have to a lot of effects. For every image and every transition, you have to add a sound effect. You need flashing graphics, and you have to have subtitles in every video.” - Washington Post
"The post-pandemic picture is improving but from such a low that no one can feel confident about moving forward. Theater attendance hasn’t yet rebounded to pre-pandemic levels, production and administrative costs have skyrocketed with inflation, and donor fatigue has turned to exhaustion." - Los Angeles Times (MSN)
The two years of apprenticeship is so tough that former dancers who went on to sitcom work, Broadway, and even the unionized top-level Ailey troupe feel like everything else is a breeze. - The New York Times
Hinst for fake-info spotting every day of the year: “Stop when you see something that's 'too good to be true, or too crazy to be believable, or too-anger inducing.’” - NPR
In pursuit of info, the first season of the actor’s podcast “featured guests like Carol Burnett (90), Isabel Allende (81) and Darlene Love (82). The second ... includes Julie Andrews (88), Patti Smith (77) and Ina Garten (76).” That’s many years of accumulated ideas, and, sometimes, wisdom. - The New York Times
From Jeanne Claude and Christo’s wrappings to Banksy’s newest tree, “public art requires us to be present, to bring it to life with our imaginations, to think about how it was constructed, what its location looked like before, and how the art ties in with what already exists." - The Guardian (UK)
