It's all too real: "Philadelphia is the poorest of the country's 10 largest cities, and its school district has long suffered from chronic underfunding. The average Philly school is also more than 70 years old — most don't have central air conditioning and were built using lead and asbestos." - NPR
María Mercedes Coroy may be a star of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, but "the day after filming her final scene in Los Angeles, headed home to Santa María de Jesús, a Kaqchikel Maya town of about 22,000 at the base of a volcano in Guatemala." - The New York Times
"'It’s called stealing,' said comic strip artist Hy Eisman, who has just turned 96 and only recently discovered that Lichtenstein had reproduced one of his images in the 1960s. 'I worked like a dog on this stupid page and this guy has $20m to show for it.'" - The Observer (UK)
It just needed a couple of Brooklyn plumbers, a princess, and the Mushroom Kingdom to bring it back to life. (Super Marios Bros. generated numbers, both in the U.S. and abroad, "that one Hollywood trade news site called 'plumb insane.'") - The New York Times
Why is Matt Taibbi leaving? "Twitter seems to be in a drag-out fight with Substack, blocking users from liking, replying to, or retweeting many tweets with Substack URLs and ... limiting how you can interact with tweets from Substack’s Twitter account itself." - The Verge
In Terence Blanchard's opera Champion, opening at the Met, "there are not only new arias (and new lines for supporting characters); what will be heard ... also reflects Blanchard’s latest work when it comes to orchestral complexity and vocal elegance." - The New York Times
"Before filming, Williams participated in sculpture training sessions, both on Zoom and in-person at Lahti’s art studio in Portland. Lahti began by sculpting while Williams watched, and later the actor got her hands dirty and molded clay herself." - Los Angeles Times
Modern art was profoundly affected by jazz. You can see its influence not only on American artists such as Romare Bearden, Robert Colescott and Bob Thompson but also on Matisse, Picasso and Mondrian. Has hip-hop had a comparable impact on art? - Washington Post
While it remains unclear why the “Chief Twit” suddenly decided to place NPR in the same category as Chinese and Russian government propaganda, Musk reacted with an exclamation point on Tuesday to a “Twitter Files” reporter Michael Shellenberger’s thread criticizing NPR. - The Daily Beast
This idea of “illusory realism” struck me as apt. The A.I. content has the appearance of realism, without actual reality—reality solely as a style. - The New Yorker
In conventional broadcasting, Canadian content quotas serve as a discoverability measure, ensuring that minimum amounts of Canadian programs are broadcast to the public. - The Conversation
Too many of the undergrads taking the course I currently teach cannot read. They’re literate, of course, but unable to sit long enough to read a chapter from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden or an essay about an Australian ecofeminist nearly mauled to death by a crocodile. - AlJazeera
The initial production’s optimistic look at how ethical leaders harness power to forge better worlds seems hopelessly naive in this divided political environment. Or maybe not — maybe “Camelot” is just what we need. - Variety
