"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
“I think the greatest challenge for us as interpreters today is to find authenticity of spirit in the music we interpret, and that's a cultural thing. There are two ways to do it. One is as a tourist and the other one is a native. - BachTrack
"In many Western countries, pole dance classes achieved mainstream popularity years ago. Egypt's pole-dancing culture has been slower to grow — partly due to the country's conservative society. … Though social media has helped Egyptian pole dancers tackle taboos, misunderstandings persist." - Dance Magazine
Many of the results show consistency with the last survey in 2019: 97% of Australians engage with the arts, 84% acknowledge positive impacts of arts and creativity, 73% believe that First Nations arts and culture are an important part of Australia’s culture and 61% agree culture and creativity should receive public funding. - Limelight
At the Ambronay Festival in France, Alejandro Meerapfel, a 54-year-old Argentine, was performing in an oratorio called Il Dono della vita eterna (The Gift of Eternal Life). The concert was being telecast live on France TV's Culturebox. (And that's not the strangest part of all this.) - Classical Music (UK)
While U.S. universities charge ever higher tuition in an arms race for the best facilities and research, leading to a soaring student debt crisis, U.K. universities have the opposite problem. They aren’t able to charge enough. They are cutting back on everything from research to teacher salaries to dorm rooms. - The Wall Street Journal
