Across the developed world, since the 1930s, there’s been what’s called the Flynn effect: IQ scores overall have been rising by about three points a decade — through the turn of the millennium, that is. Social scientist Elizabeth Dworak has documented the effect reversing since 2006. This surprises few people. - New York Magazine (MSN)
“Having this language that is spoken by so very few, I feel that we carry a huge responsibility to actually preserve that. I do not personally think we are doing enough to do that,” she said, not least because young people in Iceland “are absolutely surrounded by material in English, on social media and other media”....
The Frattini Bivouac is not staffed, ticketed or mediated. Anyone can enter it, but only after a six-to-eight-hour ascent on foot across scree, moss and snowfields. - The Guardian
Julie Cruse is a pioneer of “computational choreography”: in 2007 she created a piece titled Choreobot in which she used software she coded to generate choreography. Here she looks at the earliest efforts to automatically create movement, explains how her program works, and looks at how AI could develop and change it. - Dance Magazine
Jenny Mollica will step down from her current role in summer 2026 to become CEO of London music and arts venue Roundhouse. Mollica will succeed Marcus Davey CBE who steps down after 27 years at the helm of the Camden venue, while the process to appoint ENO’s next CEO is now underway. - Classical Music UK
This culture of self-quantification in the pursuit of self-improvement long predates social media, algorithms and targeted advertising. In fact, we can trace its roots back into the daily lives and preoccupations of the Victorian middle classes. - Aeon
“If authentically delivered, the potential is colossal. India’s population of 1.4 billion includes a fast-growing urban middle class … (with) a rising appetite for theatre that blends storytelling, music and spectacle. The real question is whether India can find its own mainstream musical theatre voice, and cinema may offer some clues.” - The Stage (UK)
Even as a significant proportion of their students are submitting AI-generated work, they proudly reassure each other that their courses are too demanding or too humanistic for any machine to understand them. - Persuasion
Most notably, composer Gabriela Ortiz, who won three Grammys last time, could do it again, as she’s a triple nominee this year. Overall, in fact, the list of nominees is (as has been the case for a number of years now) largely dominated by contemporary music, most of it American. - The Washington Post (MSN)
Dancers began to question their careers and who they were apart from being dancers. Some saw their bodies change. Some decided to have children. And many started paying closer attention to their mental well-being. - The New York Times
The resignations come as the BBC enters a decisive period. The renewal of its royal charter in 2027 will define the corporation’s funding model and public purpose for the next decade. At the same time, the BBC faces a hostile political climate, sustained financial pressure, and a rapidly fragmenting audience. - NiemanLab
The arrangement resolves litigation filed by NPR accusing the corporation of illegally yielding to Trump's demands that the network be financially punished for its news coverage. - NPR
“Since the first of his Paramount+ originals premiered in 2021, Sheridan's titles have generated more than $800 million in global streaming revenue for the platform.” And that’s without domestic revenue from his cornerstone show, Yellowstone, whose US streaming rights are held by Peacock. - TheWrap (MSN)
“Researchers discovered the anonymous, undated works in Belgium's Royal Library in 1992, but it wasn’t until recently that they were able to authenticate Bach as their author. … Entitled Chaconne in D minor BWV 1178 and Chaconne in G minor BWV 1179, the pieces were … (premiered at) Leipzig’s St. Thomas Church.” - The Guardian
He was a guitar-playing folklorist who had run the Country Music Foundation in Nashville for 26 years, when President Clinton nominated him to chair the NEA in 1998. Congressional Republicans had repeatedly cut the agency’s budget following controversies over grantees; Ivey won the lawmakers over, and the NEA grew again. - The New York Times
First, they repeatedly play a little melody on a glockenspiel or dinner chime or marimba as they stroll through the lobbies. Then, says one longtime usher at the Metropolitan Opera, “We have to push them, kind of like moving cattle.” - The New York Times
Taylor and Travis, podcast hosts, even chatbots — this has been a year full of intense but one-sided relationships between some ordinary individuals and celebrities (or pieces of code) they’ve never actually met. - Cambridge University Press
The museum has shuttered some office space and the Campana Gallery (which showcases ancient Greek ceramics) due to “particular fragility of certain beams holding up the floors.” - AP
This culture of self-quantification in the pursuit of self-improvement long predates social media, algorithms and targeted advertising. In fact, we can trace its roots back into the daily lives and preoccupations of the Victorian middle classes. - Aeon
Even as a significant proportion of their students are submitting AI-generated work, they proudly reassure each other that their courses are too demanding or too humanistic for any machine to understand them. - Persuasion
“Let’s say you are a Netflix fan, as anyone making a pilgrimage to Netflix House is sure to be. What, then, are you a fan of? … Netflix has been on a relentless campaign to become a fandom hub, a never-ending Comic-Con celebrating itself.” - Slate
“As a creative, I have really enjoyed creating her,” she says. “It’s been just like a writer creating characters. You fall in love with your characters when you’re writing them. It’s a wonderful process. It wasn’t like I just made her in a second, and that was it. You know, it took a long time.” - Variety
Across the developed world, since the 1930s, there’s been what’s called the Flynn effect: IQ scores overall have been rising by about three points a decade — through the turn of the millennium, that is. Social scientist Elizabeth Dworak has documented the effect reversing since 2006. This surprises few people. - New York Magazine...
First, they repeatedly play a little melody on a glockenspiel or dinner chime or marimba as they stroll through the lobbies. Then, says one longtime usher at the Metropolitan Opera, “We have to push them, kind of like moving cattle.” - The New York Times
Visitors to Washington have a new, free attraction: the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream. After a $500 million renovation of two former banks across from the Treasury Department, the center opened in September to explore the past, present and future of this enduring but elusive aspiration. - Washington Post
Dynamic pricing is common, and as one performing arts critic pointed out, it “can shift in both directions, with prices increasing when tickets start selling out at popular shows but also decreasing where demand is slower.” - BBC
“Personal data isn’t just a record of who we are. It’s our actions, transactions, locations, conversations, preferences, inferences, and vulnerabilities. It’s our identities, our intimate selves, our hopes and dreams, and our fears and flaws.” - Fast Company
Jenny Mollica will step down from her current role in summer 2026 to become CEO of London music and arts venue Roundhouse. Mollica will succeed Marcus Davey CBE who steps down after 27 years at the helm of the Camden venue, while the process to appoint ENO’s next CEO is now underway. - Classical Music...
Most notably, composer Gabriela Ortiz, who won three Grammys last time, could do it again, as she’s a triple nominee this year. Overall, in fact, the list of nominees is (as has been the case for a number of years now) largely dominated by contemporary music, most of it American. - The Washington Post...
“Researchers discovered the anonymous, undated works in Belgium's Royal Library in 1992, but it wasn’t until recently that they were able to authenticate Bach as their author. … Entitled Chaconne in D minor BWV 1178 and Chaconne in G minor BWV 1179, the pieces were … (premiered at) Leipzig’s St. Thomas Church.” - The...
Three record companies—Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group—control more than 80 percent of all recorded music released through a recognized label. And they do so with a collective iron fist, jealously guarding access to their vast catalogs, whether through album sales, streaming platforms, radio airplay, or commercial licensing. - n+one
This month, an A.I. country song called “Walk My Walk” hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart, and passed three million streams on Spotify; the performer behind it is a square-jawed digital avatar named Breaking Rust. - The New Yorker
The Frattini Bivouac is not staffed, ticketed or mediated. Anyone can enter it, but only after a six-to-eight-hour ascent on foot across scree, moss and snowfields. - The Guardian
The museum has shuttered some office space and the Campana Gallery (which showcases ancient Greek ceramics) due to “particular fragility of certain beams holding up the floors.” - AP
“Like many of my museum colleagues,” said Eliza Rathbone, chief curator emerita at the Phillips, “I’m deeply saddened and appalled that the Phillips Collection would so irreparably mar the vision of the founder by selling such carefully chosen works.” - Washington Post
The museum director: “In many ways I do feel the timing of our opening now is ideal. … We’re opening in a moment that's very much like the moment when the museum was founded.” - Gothamist
“Children ran, some of them in stocking feet, through the displays, with abandon. (Running had been discouraged in the safety lecture, but this did not dissuade a young boy who shouted ‘I have to look for the animals that will hunt us in the night.’)” - The New York Times
He “was seen on CCTV waiting outside the gallery for about 10 minutes on 8 September last year, before repeatedly smashing the glass door with a heavy blunt object.” - The Guardian (UK)
“Having this language that is spoken by so very few, I feel that we carry a huge responsibility to actually preserve that. I do not personally think we are doing enough to do that,” she said, not least because young people in Iceland “are absolutely surrounded by material in English, on social media and...
Taylor and Travis, podcast hosts, even chatbots — this has been a year full of intense but one-sided relationships between some ordinary individuals and celebrities (or pieces of code) they’ve never actually met. - Cambridge University Press
There’s an extensive online discourse on the Baby Boomer generation’s penchant for ellipses. ‘OK . . .’ ‘Thanks . . .’ ‘See you next week . . .’ Sometimes they’re a playful way to build suspense, sometimes a form of passive aggression, and sometimes they relay an implication. - Granta
Viet Thanh Nguyen: “When poets write, the only thing that it costs a poet is their life. ... But when you make a TV show or a film, it costs tens of millions of dollars, and then everybody cares.” - Los Angeles Review of Books
"When we listen to audiobooks produced in the West, they have a Wakandan accent," said Eghosa Imasuen, executive director of Narrative Landscape Press in Lagos, Nigeria. "Nobody talks like that on the continent." - Publishers Weekly
The resignations come as the BBC enters a decisive period. The renewal of its royal charter in 2027 will define the corporation’s funding model and public purpose for the next decade. At the same time, the BBC faces a hostile political climate, sustained financial pressure, and a rapidly fragmenting audience. - NiemanLab
The arrangement resolves litigation filed by NPR accusing the corporation of illegally yielding to Trump's demands that the network be financially punished for its news coverage. - NPR
“Since the first of his Paramount+ originals premiered in 2021, Sheridan's titles have generated more than $800 million in global streaming revenue for the platform.” And that’s without domestic revenue from his cornerstone show, Yellowstone, whose US streaming rights are held by Peacock. - TheWrap (MSN)
It’s great that wheelchair user Marissa Bode plays wheelchair user Nessarose Thropp, but “after the release of the first Wicked film in November 2024, Bode was targeted on social media” — and she expects the same thing to happen with the new Wicked movie. - The Guardian (UK)
Matthew Belloni has become a narrator of the industry’s troubles during the most transformative period since the birth of television, brought on by the arrival of tech companies and the disappearance of the lucrative cable TV model, followed closely behind by theater audiences. - The New York Times
Instead of addressing the criticism, the BBC was silent for seven days. In the vacuum, a wave of headlines became a flood of unchallenged claims that eventually pulled in the White House, with press secretary Karoline Leavitt declaring the BBC “total, 100 percent fake news.” - The New York Times
Julie Cruse is a pioneer of “computational choreography”: in 2007 she created a piece titled Choreobot in which she used software she coded to generate choreography. Here she looks at the earliest efforts to automatically create movement, explains how her program works, and looks at how AI could develop and change it. - Dance...
Dancers began to question their careers and who they were apart from being dancers. Some saw their bodies change. Some decided to have children. And many started paying closer attention to their mental well-being. - The New York Times
“On Wednesday, Dallas City Council voted to grant $225,000 for cultural programming to (DBDT). Last year, $248,000 in funding was cut in response to (DBDT’s) settlement with the National Labor Relations Board. The agency found merit to dozens of unfair labor practice charges …, including the firing of dancers due to union efforts.” -...
“How? The answer in (one) case was Velcro-covered suits, … just one form of technology that dancers are using to simulate the effects of weightlessness here on Earth. But for some, the end goal is to experience a true lack of gravity by bringing dance to space.” - Dance Magazine
“As (Ruth) Childs carved her own path as a freelance dancer (in Europe), the specter of her aunt’s work loomed. It continued to deter her from making her own choreography, until it inspired her to try.” - The New York Times
“If authentically delivered, the potential is colossal. India’s population of 1.4 billion includes a fast-growing urban middle class … (with) a rising appetite for theatre that blends storytelling, music and spectacle. The real question is whether India can find its own mainstream musical theatre voice, and cinema may offer some clues.” - The Stage (UK)
Imagine a painter still layering colors on a canvas while a stranger posts, “This looks messy and unfinished!” That’s what happens when someone reviews a preview. The damage lingers, and the artistry suffers. - The Broadway Maven
“If you press your ear to the plays of the 20th century, they’ll tell you secrets of human acts gone by and strategies to keep on. Among bloody slings and arrows of inhumane humanity are extraordinary scenes, real and imagined, of survival.” - American Theatre
“As a sports obsessive and avid theatergoer, I’ve always found the communal experiences staggeringly similar. Either way, we root and cheer and gasp in unison. Worship-worthy idols emerge — and nothing beats seeing them ply their trade in person.” - Washington Post (Yahoo)
There are the married couples who make sure to grab tear-away underwear, the person who has a collection of playbills, and so, so many more folks looking for pieces of Broadway history. - The New York Times
Bamako, a city of 3 million, is being squeezed by an Al-Qaeda-affiliated militia which has blocked fuel imports and made travel beyond the capital dangerous. Yet Bamakoans recently raised their spirits with a three-day festival celebrating puppetry, which has deep roots in Mali. - AP
He was a guitar-playing folklorist who had run the Country Music Foundation in Nashville for 26 years, when President Clinton nominated him to chair the NEA in 1998. Congressional Republicans had repeatedly cut the agency’s budget following controversies over grantees; Ivey won the lawmakers over, and the NEA grew again. - The New York...
A "free spirit and nonconformist, often impetuous, the passionate lover of the 19th century left his mark on the Parisian museum from 2008 to 2017 with bold exhibitions." - Le Monde
Franz's “vibrant portrayal of Linda Loman, the wife of the piteous title character in the 1999 Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, earned her a Tony Award — and high praise from the playwright.” - The New York Times
In Britain, she was told she’d never succeed because of her race. So she started theatre companies in Jamaica, and also in London. “In her focus on all-Black casts and re-workings of classics, … Ms. Brewster’s motivation was always artistic, she said.” - The New York Times
“So we have to be a bit careful with that word, right? Because I do think words are important. And that word has been overused and applied to all sorts of things.” Q: “Which type of feminist are you?” “The kind that’s interested in equality under the law.” - AP
The next Vice President, Human Resources will lead the FWSO’s design and implementation of HR strategy to strength communication and collaboration across the organization.
The Program aims to attract dynamic and dedicated artists with vision, a standing in the profession, a commitment to teaching, service, and an appetite for collaborating across disciplines.
Application Deadline: Monday, December 1, 2025, at 5 p.m. P.T.
Accepting Online Applications Only Via the City of Eugene’s Website: Director of Programming | Job
“If you press your ear to the plays of the 20th century, they’ll tell you secrets of human acts gone by and strategies to keep on. Among bloody slings and arrows of inhumane humanity are extraordinary scenes, real and imagined, of survival.” - American Theatre
“As with most things in life, when expertise is devalued, it’s easier to pass trash off as treasure. AutoTune and AI are enabling people who lack musical talent to game the system — like audio catfish.” - Los Angeles Times (Yahoo)
Bob Iger knows it’s, uh, interesting to be suing some AI companies while courting others. “'It's obviously imperative for us to protect our IP with this new technology,’ Iger said.” - NPR
“Children ran, some of them in stocking feet, through the displays, with abandon. (Running had been discouraged in the safety lecture, but this did not dissuade a young boy who shouted ‘I have to look for the animals that will hunt us in the night.’)” - The New York Times
Basically, “without consideration of multiple outside candidates, the search committee had in effect become simply a hiring committee for an in-house nominee.” That in-house nominee might be great - but that doesn’t fix the hiring process. - Los Angeles Times (MSN)
“Many of its nearly 50 grant programs have been paused or ended. … About two thirds of the staff has been laid off and, last month, most members of the scholarly council that must review a majority of grants were abruptly fired by the White House.” - The New York Times
The Dec. 5 draw, the World Cup’s highest-profile pre-tournament event, was expected to be held in Las Vegas. Trump reportedly swooped in at the 11th hour to offer use of Kennedy Center performance spaces and other facilities, for free, for almost three weeks, requiring cancellation or postponement of scheduled events. - The Washington Post...
“It’s important to us that younger generations know what the work stood for and don’t get some false impression from these decontextualized samplings — and we don’t want it to be associated with what the Department of Homeland Security is doing.” - Washington Post (MSN)
“For years we’ve been grappling with the collapse of the creative middle class due to corporate greed. … We have more content than ever, but fewer opportunities for art and artists to thrive.” - LitHub
“Navigating life in an era of ‘alternative truths’ has proved to be a disorienting experience: How can people live together when truth has become whatever one would like it to be?” - Le Monde (Archive Today)
The resignations “came several days after The Daily Telegraph published details of a leaked internal memo arguing that a BBC Panorama documentary had juxtaposed comments by Mr. Trump in a way that made it appear that he had explicitly encouraged the attack on the Capitol.” - The New York Times
“At a time when the Trump administration is cutting arts funding and seeking to influence content at the Smithsonian, the shutdown, now the longest in the nation’s history, is adding further uncertainty to D.C.’s already rattled museums.” - Washington Post (MSN)
