"It’s a highbrow-meets-lowbrow thing," said the Dutch tattoo artist completing the requests. He's done it before, but "this time, had a greater ambition: to reproduce one of Rembrandt’s most famous etchings, The Descent From the Cross, from 1633, across a man’s back." - The New York Times
"The 95-year-old National Symphony Orchestra has been performing in the Kennedy Center since it opened in 1971. Now, the musicians and their charismatic music director Gianandrea Noseda are musical nomads while the future of the arts complex, with its proposed renovations, remains uncertain." - NPR
Robert Stivanello: "The opera costume business has changed a lot. ... Covid killed a lot of opera companies." Now the knock-on effect has killed his company as well. - The New York Times
"Silicon Valley has become adept at repurposing science fiction as building blocks of its fantastical hype machine. When authors try to imagine a future in which machines have thoughts and feelings, their work instantly seems to get woven into a tapestry of bullshit." - Happy Dancing
"'Defendants are shuttering the Kennedy Center to hide the ongoing mismanagement of this once vibrant institution and to placate its current chairman,' they wrote in the filing." - The New York Times
“The Elvis plaintiffs bring this action to enforce these exclusive rights against the defendant that has built its entire business model based on copyright infringement at a scale never seen before," according to the lawsuit. - The New York Times
"'It’s like the opposite of Hearts of Darkness,' Sofia said. 'In a way it’s sort of a nice counterpoint because that movie’s so macho and masculine and this is so feminine.' And it’s also true to what really happened." - Seattle Times (AP)
For instance: "Why it hired a new music director ... amid much fanfare last March; whether any employees other than CEO Peter Kjome will be paid during the suspension; or what, specifically, is being done to help the musicians and staff whose pay has been cut off." - Phoenix New Times
"Being vulnerable with his subjects generally inspires them to return the favor. ... He’s seen subjects go to trial, face romantic rejection, and lose their jobs on-camera; he’s also been holed up in a dingy motel bathroom while two of them had sex in the other room." - New York Magazine (MSN)
“(She) brought a casual, if knowledgeable, approach to her reviews, writing more from the viewpoint of a popcorn-eating moviegoer than from the lofty perch of a scholar of cinema. She wrote hundreds of reviews ... over more than 20 years and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in criticism in 2008.” - The Washington Post (MSN)
"It’s his essays about art and artists that matter most to me now. Reading them, you often feel you’re standing next to him in the museum or even looking through his eyes at a painting or a sculpture. You pay attention to his attention." - The New York Times
Sherry Turkle: An AI is "really not afraid of death, it’s not afraid of illness, it's not afraid of pain, it doesn't love its children, and it doesn't care if you kill yourself or make dinner." - Wired
Elif Shafak's latest book "arose out of our own historical moment, which Shafak has dubbed 'The age of three As: Angst, Anger and AI.'" - The Guardian (UK)
"The prize is open to unpublished manuscripts, with the option of submitting under a pseudonym, and Allende entered under the name Luz Ventura, with the fictional title Los que faltan." - The Guardian (UK)
Hunh: "Distributor Bleecker Street was informed Friday afternoon a 'permanent suspension' was coming regarding any ads it tried to buy, and the company was unable to do so shortly after." - The Hollywood Reporter
"In an era when corporate publishers dominate a rapidly consolidating industry, New Directions has remained independent and continued its long tradition of seeking out and nurturing some of the world’s most seminal authors." - The New York Times
Andrew Potter says it's the money. "We just have to start telling the truth, and that is that unless you're in the top 1- or 2% of singers in the world, this is not something that you'll be able to sustain a family with." - NPR
"Publishers are now using LLMs like Claude and ChatGPT to email literary agents, write publicity and back-cover copy, design cover art, and generate marketing materials, often at the direction of their executives." - Wired
