A machine will never possess the level of interpersonal skills needed to manage a team, to engage in civil discourse with individuals from different cultures and backgrounds, or to resolve messy human conflicts that resist logic. Judgment will never be AI’s strength. - US News

Neuroplasticity therefore reframes the brain as neither rigid nor infinitely malleable, but as a living system shaped by experience, effort and time. - The Conversation

The old metaphor of creativity being sparked makes it sound like there’s a creativity center in the brain that’s just waiting to kick things off. But brain scans of jazz improvisers point to a much more diffuse picture of creativity’s location. - Psychology Today

Intelligence and consciousness are different things. Intelligence is mainly about doing: solving a crossword puzzle, assembling some furniture, navigating a tricky family situation, walking to the shop — all involve intelligent behavior of some kind. - Noema

A massive new study comparing more than 100,000 people with today’s most advanced AI systems delivers a surprising result: generative AI can now beat the average human on certain creativity tests.  - Science Daily

The First Amendment ignores the harms that speech inflicts. It is dangerous, in other words, not for the threat it poses to power, but for the harms it inflicts on the vulnerable. - The Nation

In the 35 years since the novel made its bloody splash, there have been a hit movie, a stage musical, and countless memes. Now a remake of the film is in the works, the musical is being revived, and Patrick Bateman is a role model for the Andrew Tate manosphere. - The Guardian

The battle is approaching a tipping point after the Smithsonian acquiesced to an administration demand to hand over documents regarding the types of exhibits it will display for America’s 250th anniversary this summer. - The Hill

Two Fridays ago, the center announced the appointment of Kevin Couch, who programmed for pop/rock venues in four midsized cities, as the new senior vice president of artistic programming. Last week the center tweeted the news. On Wednesday, with no further comment, Couch confirmed his resignation. - The Washington Post (MSN)

While the reductions aren’t as severe as in Berlin (€130 million) or France (€150 million), the Austrian capital has withdrawn €5 million from several theaters, including the award-winning Theater an der Wien, €250,000 from the Vienna Philharmonic’s Summer Night Concert, and €1.3 million from the Wien Museum. - The New York Times

He posted on Truth Social, referring to cascading cancellations and plummeting ticket sales, “People don’t realize that The Trump Kennedy Center suffered massive deficits for many years and, like everything else, I merely came in to save it and, if possible, make it far better than ever before!” - The Daily Beast

Trump officials have ordered national parks to remove dozens of signs and displays related to climate change, environmental protection and settlers’ mistreatment of Native Americans in a renewed push to implement President Donald Trump’s executive order on “restoring truth and sanity to American history.” - Washington Post

The companies, including Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord Music Group, and ABKCO Music, are seeking more than $3 billion in potential statutory damages over alleged infringement of more than 20,000 songs. - Music Business Worldwide

A recent survey found that about a third of responding musicians were dealing or had dealt with an eating disorder. While there’s not yet any research as to why classical musicians develop eating disorders, several known risk factors are very common in the profession. - Classical Music (UK)

The milestone year reflected the “largest annual payment to music from any retailer in history,” the company announced on Wednesday in a post. In 2025, Spotify’s payout amount grew by over 10%, making the Sweden-based streamer one of the industry’s main revenue drivers. - Los Angeles Times

“After nearly 40 years as the charismatic founder and recognizable face of Jazz at Lincoln Center, Wynton Marsalis will step down as managing and artistic director next year, the organization announced on Thursday, ending a transformative tenure that raised the profile of jazz nationwide.” - The New York Times

Not just any opera, mind you: the story is one to which he has a long connection: the Pushkin/Tchaikovsky Eugene Onegin. The person who invited Fiennes is his longtime friend Semyon Bychkov, and the production is at the company where Bychkov was just appointed music director, the Paris Opera. - Prospect

In 2025, Yannick Nézet-Séguin tops our list of busiest conductors, with an amazing 120 listed engagements – and looking back over the last decade of data, Nézet-Séguin has been a consistent presence among the busiest. - BachTrack

“It feels more important than ever to invite multiple voices into the museum space. There isn’t one perfect solution for all visitors, but we strive to offer a variety of access points—whether it’s traditional labels, guided gallery conversations or prompts to spark reflection and dialogue.” - The Art Newspaper

As some other American museums struggle, the Institute is doing very well under Rondeau’s leadership (notwithstanding the medication-and-alcohol-fueled disrobing during a commercial flight last April). He’s now pushing for an expansion, saying the museum needs more display space. - WBEZ (Chicago)

“The MFA faces ‘an unsustainable deficit that we have committed to resolve,’ (an) email to employees stated. … The institution said in a statement to WBUR it plans to reduce 6.3% of its workforce. More than 30 museum positions will be affected.” - WBUR (Boston)

“Free First Thursday, which waives the general admission fee for all Bay Area residents from 4-8 p.m. on the first Thursday of each month, has been temporarily halted starting in February. … No return date has been set, but SFMOMA plans to announce a new program series in the summer.” - San Francisco Chronicle...

Last Saturday, as museum staff were preparing the building for the winter storm, a sprinkler malfunction caused water to pour from a ceiling near the gift shop. The building was evacuated and closed for this week, but full repairs will require one additional week. - ARTnews

Over 50% of the AAM survey’s respondents reported fewer visitors than in 2019 and 29% reported “declines tied to weakened travel and tourism and/or economic uncertainty”. This, of course, varies hugely from state to state. - The Art Newspaper

The occasion is a moment to ask how a novel that mourns addiction and venerates humility and patience became a glib cultural punch line, routinely subjected to the word “performative” in its most damning sense. - The New Yorker

Greg Ketter became a social media phenomenon over the weekend, when MS Now aired a video of him pacing half a block away from where Alex J. Pretti had been murdered by agents an hour earlier, cursing the 50-100 armed ICE agents keeping the crowd back. - Publishers Weekly

“Constellations – also jokingly dubbed ‘Not Writers’ Week’ – is being put on by “a loose coalition” of writers and publishers and the support of not-for-profit Writers SA, with dozens of free events to be staged from 28 February to 5 March.” - The Guardian

Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville, published in 1851. Let’s consider it. Is there another book at once so good and so bad, so thrilling and so boring, so authentic to the currents of the soul and so hideously contrived, so stunningly patrolled by dreamlike visions and so crushed by its own intellectual baggage? - The...

“Defendants in Crookshanks v. Elizabeth (Colo.) School District, who had appealed to the 10th Circuit after a federal judge ordered the district to restore 19 censored books, motioned to dismiss their own appeal on January 20. A three-judge panel had been scheduled to hear oral argument on January 23.” - Publishers Weekly

Within about a year, according to the filings, the company had spent tens of millions of dollars to acquire and slice the spines off millions of books, before scanning their pages to feed more knowledge into the AI models behind products such as its popular chatbot Claude. - Washington Post

The BBC has been urged to rethink color-blind casting “tokenism” and “preachy” storylines about the UK’s colonial history in scripted series, according to a major study commissioned by the broadcaster. - Deadline

Under Bezos’s leadership, CEO Will Lewis has floated a bunch of proposals to make the company profitable, few of which so far resemble anything people might actually want to buy. - Intelligencer (MSN)

“For almost a quarter-century Freeview has enabled viewers to access (digital terrestrial) television from the nation’s biggest broadcasters … for no charge. Despite it still being the UK’s largest TV platform, … those same broadcasters are now calling for the service to be switched off in as little as eight years’ time.” - The Guardian

Yes, the filmmaker behind The Lobster, The Favourite, Poor Things and Bugonia has made ads for Squarespace (the website-building platform) and Grubhub to air during Super Bowl LX. The Grubhub spot is untitled, but the Squarespace commercial is titled Unavailable, and, of course, it stars Emma Stone. - The Hollywood Reporter

The vanishingly rare presentations of stage work, whether dance, opera or theatre, are invariably acquisitions from cultural organisations that provided most of the funding and all of the production expertise.  - The Conversation

“I’m going to be putting tariffs on movies from outside of the country,” the president told The California Post in an interview shared Monday. “If they’re made in Canada, if they’re made in all these places, because Los Angeles has lost the movie industry.” - Yahoo

For such a large city, L.A. has been a difficult environment for classical dance; before this company, no ballet troupe there had lasted for more than nine years. Artistic director Melissa Barak and executive director Julia Rivera talk with a reporter about how Los Angeles Ballet has lasted and where it’s headed. - Pointe...

The Switzerland-based ballet competition, known for launching the careers of many star dancers, takes place next week. Here executive and artistic director Kathryn Bradney explains to a reporter how the 90-odd contestants are selected, how the weeklong event is structured, and how the important part comes the day afterward. - Pointe Magazine

When CBS Sunday Morning visited, its crew found young dance students silently meditating. Two former students say, however, that they were allowed limited contact with family, berated by teachers, physically pushed to the point of injury, and forbidden to seek medical attention. - CBS News

It’s part of an effort by the Royal Winnipeg, Canada’s oldest professional ballet company, to foster meaningful reconciliation with the country’s Indigenous people — echoing a broader national goal that has been pursued for decades. - The New York Times

“We spoke to DJs, dance experts, real estate agents who make dancing home-tour videos, aspiring professional dancers and club owners to get their take. Spoiler: Dancing is far from dead. But has it downsized? Migrated? Is it complicated? Yes, yes and yes.” - The Washington Post (MSN)

There’s a new executive director, a search for an artistic director, and of course, it’s trying to keep a 71-year-old arts institution going. - Sacramento Bee (Yahoo)

“TheatreWorks Silicon Valley is partnering with the city of Palo Alto on a new venue at a familiar location. The municipality and the Tony-winning theater company announced plans to redevelop (its) existing theater … and build a new one next to it, forming a performing arts complex of 40,000 square feet.” - San Francisco...

The dinner theater/circus arts hybrid's founder says that attendance never really recovered from COVID, but that, this past fall, there began a fatal decline in sales which he attributed to an uncertain economy and fear of ICE. - WBEZ (Chicago)

“The Outsiders, … which opened in April 2024 and won the Tony Award for best new musical two months later, has recouped its $22 million capitalization costs. … The milestone, though occasionally achieved by plays and musical revivals, is an increasingly rare one for new musicals.” - The New York Times

"Stoppard wasn’t telling a story of Nazis and gas chambers; he was exploring the psychological danger of hiding one’s Jewish identity. A month after seeing the play, I decided to fly to London in search of some of my own hidden pieces.” - The Atlantic

“Apprentices can study one of five tracks: directing and artistic programs, lighting design, production management, scenic paint or stage management. The apprenticeships are about 10 months long.” - Seattle Times

Simon Stephens' mixed-reality experiment at The Shed asks the existential question: if actors perform in cyberspace and no one applauds, is it still theater? Four digitally-captured performers test mortality's latest theatrical frontier. - American Theatre

Over the course of his 38-year reign, he aged from a famously handsome monarch into an overweight, volatile despot. Various explanations, from syphilis to scurvy to psychopathy, have been proposed over the centuries, yet these diagnoses often tell us more about the preoccupations of the time than about Henry himself. - History Today

The dissident artist, who in 2011 had his passport confiscated and spent 81 days in prison, left when his documents were returned in 2015 and has lived in Europe since. Last month he took the risk of re-detention to visit — and things went smoothly. What had he missed most while away? Speaking Chinese....

The claim that Emilia Bassano Lanier was Shakespeare’s “Dark Lady” is now familiar; even the argument that she — a published poet under her own name — was the real writer of Shakespeare’s works has been made before. Historian Irene Coslet is now arguing that Bassano Lanier was both Jewish and Black. - The...

Maria Manetti Shrem’s influence is everywhere - as is her name, alongside that of her late husband. A short list: The new UC Davis fashion institute, “the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco Opera, SFFilm, KQED.” - San Francisco Chronicle (Yahoo)

"Famously loyal to her artists, Ms. Goodman aimed to place their work in museum collections rather than in private mansions. Her priorities could amount to a thorn in the side of collectors.” - The New York Times

Elle Fanning has had quite the year. Her “ability to hop between a thorny Norwegian drama and a high-concept alien movie is exactly the kind of exciting malleability that audiences forced to wade through modern cinema’s sea of sameness deserve.” - Salon