Spotify Is Testing AI-Generated Podcast Translations In The Podcasters’ Voices
The Spotify-developed tool uses OpenAI’s recently released voice-generation technology to match the original speaker’s style. That, according to Spotify, results in a “more authentic listening...
Our Education System Was Created In Industrial Times. We Need An Upgrade
Such systems, sculpted for an industrial society, falter in the face of a postindustrial, information economy. Schools were built for a world before the...
FTC: Time To Hold Amazon Accountable
Lina Khan made her reputation with a very different idea: What if pleasing the customer was not enough? Low prices, she argued in a 95-page examination...
Attacking Orchestras’ Audience Problem
"We say we need new audiences, but the reality is we're really churning through the new audiences we do get." In the arts...
How Sondheim’s Last (Incomplete) Musical Made It To The Stage
How did a show that Team Sondheim suggested was incomplete at the time of his death get to a point where it was ready...
Think Our Politicians Indulge In Too Much Performance? Consider The Emperor Nero
"For a start, the boundary between the emperor and his acting parts was a significantly blurry one. … The awful black hole at the...
The Great Organs Of Texas
Both Southern Methodist University and the University of North Texas have long and notable histories of training organists who’ve gone on to major church,...
Google Search Is Arguably The Internet’s Most Important Innovation. Now It’s Also A Tragedy.
"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....
My Books Were Used To Train AI. So What?
Perhaps chopping prose into tokens is not how I would like to be read. But then, who am I to say what my work...
At 88, Yvonne Rainer Is Touring Her Final Choreographic Work
"'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...
Frank Lloyd Wright Designed Only One Theatre. It’s Fallen Into Disrepair
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...
Some US Regional Theater Companies Are Bouncing Back Well From The Pandemic. Here’s Why.
How the Barter Theatre in rural southwestern Virginia, Signature Theatre in metro DC, Milwaukee Repertory Theater, and TheatreSquared in Fayetteville, Arkansas kept up contact...
New York Public Radio Will Lay Off 12% Of Its Staff
"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'...
One Of Ethiopia’s Most Sacred Objects, Looted 155 Years Ago, Is Returned
"A sacred tablet that was stolen by British troops during the 1868 Battle of Maqdala in Ethiopia was restituted in a service at a...
This Writer’s Books Were Used To Train Meta’s New AI Program. So He Asked...
Fred Kaplan, defense columnist for Slate: "When pressed with an even mildly confounding question, the machine just makes stuff up. Which makes me wonder:...
Here Are The 183,000 Books Which Authors Suing Meta Over (Is Yours One Of...
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...
And What-All Is In This New Agreement Between The Studios And The Writers Guild?
The answer: not everything the writers wanted, but a lot more than anyone thought would be there six months ago — "a deal far...
The Hollywood Writers’ Strike Is Officially Over
"The governing boards of the eastern and western branches of the Writers Guild of America and their joint negotiating committee all voted to accept...
In Early America, Settlers Had To Make Up A Lot Of Words
Much of the landscape of North America was new to the English, so many early word inventions applied to the natural world. Often these...
State Of The Publishing Industry
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...
Portland’s Artist Repertory Theatre Pauses – Audiences Down 20-50 Percent
“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...
Group Files Suit To Stop Construction Of New Memphis Art Museum
That piece of land is referred to as "the promenade." According to the descendants of Memphis founders, who are referred to as the "heirs"...
Semyon Bychkov On Authenticity In Music
“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...
Poof! Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony Folds. But Why?
“Before the pandemic, we had 8,000 subscribers. As of today, we have 2,000 subscribers. That’s a huge difference.” - Waterloo Record
Pole Dancing Is Catching On Even in Egypt
"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...
