"Although the festivals won't be as deprived of stars as feared, the agreements mean there will be a patchwork of talent: Who is and isn't attending depends on the project, the person's role in it and even their own calculation about the optics of appearing (or not)." - Yahoo! (Los Angeles Times)
"During a brief online status conference on August 31, federal judge Alan D. Albright said he will issue a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of HB 900, Texas's controversial new book rating law. The highly anticipated decision comes ... just a day before the law was set to take effect." - Publishers Weekly
"A headless bronze statue believed to depict the Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius was ordered seized from the Cleveland Museum of Art by New York authorities investigating antiquities looted from Turkey." - AP
"Steppenwolf Theatre Company, one of Chicago's most storied arts institutions and long a crucial part of the city's identity, said Thursday that it was laying off 12% of its staff, effective immediately." - MSN (Chicago Tribune)
Zachary Noah Piser, a Chinese-American actor, was to play the lead in Tiananmen: A New Musical when it debuts in Phoenix in October. The cast announcement was made last Thursday, when Piser happened to be performing in Shanghai; on Friday he made a brief statement announcing his withdrawal. - CNN
A survey of the past shows that genius is not randomly scattered about, like the seeds of a dandelion, but concentrates: ancient Athens, Renaissance Florence, Silicon Valley, among other examples. Why these fertile eras and places appear, peak, and then decline is understudied as a historical phenomenon. - City Journal
The lawsuit may serve as an early bellwether of how hard it will be for all kinds of creators — Hollywood actors, novelists, musicians and computer programmers — to stop AI developers from profiting off what humans have made. - AP
“ use terms like ‘woke’ and we shouldn’t be taking on issues that are divisive and we can ill afford to lose any readers and stop it, stop it, stop it." - Washington Post
"I was learning from them, because a good conductor – and I don’t know if I am a good conductor – but a conductor who is wise knows that he can learn from an orchestra." - BachTrack
"Chase's death leaves a long trail of litigation, with numerous parties accusing him of defrauding them out of investment funds, real estate and loan proceeds … (as well as) using 'bundlers' to raise funds from groups of investors for non-existent movie projects." - Variety
ChatGPT is the oversized A.I. elephant sitting front and center in every classroom. Instructors can try to ignore or prohibit it, but doing so doesn’t change the reality of the situation: Students are curious about it, talking about it, worried about it, and using it. - Slate
"But a recent dust-up over whether his books are appropriate for teens feels more personal, and like an escalation of a growing movement to ban and restrict access to books." And it's more painful to him because it's his beloved home state, Indiana. - The New York Times
In early 2019, YouTube announced tweaks to its recommendation system with the goal of dramatically reducing the promotion of “harmful misinformation” and “borderline content” (the kinds of videos that were almost extreme enough to remove, but not quite). - The Atlantic
"Her scripts call for comfortable pauses, uncomfortable pauses, weird pauses, confused pauses, horrible pauses. … It's worth contemplating what's going on between the lines in her low and slow theater. For starters, why do some audience members find silence so off-putting?" - The New York Times
