Where billionaires in the past operated in the physical world, ushered in societal change as a byproduct of their innovation, and used their sizable largesses to try uplifting lives, today’s billionaires stretch the limits of technological reality (and law) with sheer glee, with a meagre spirit of altruism. - The Walrus

In 2025, academics worldwide published about 7 million scholarly articles ­– that’s more than 19,000 each day. On the surface, that might seem like a number to celebrate, but it also poses a problem. As the volume of research balloons, it can be hard to discern what these millions of papers actually tell us.  - Aeon

Of all the priorities that governed ancient-Egyptian life, perhaps the hardest for us to fathom is the expenditure on the afterlife, not merely as a place of immaterial spiritual reward, but as a world of material goods.  - The Atlantic

Call them legacy users, or upgrade holdouts. They’ve clung to iPhones with home buttons, Bush-era computers, and headphones older than some tech CEOs, even when doing so impedes their ability to complete everyday tasks like emailing or navigation. - The Atlantic

“People just stay very playful for a longer period of time. And it’s cross-brand. You know, it might be Teddy bears. It might be Lego bricks. It might be Transformers. It might be Barbie dolls.”  - The New Yorker

Look to Kant. - Aeon

After 26 years at the helm of Yaddo, the storied artist retreat currently celebrating its 100th anniversary, Elaina Richardson is moving on. She will be succeeded by Cyra Levenson, deputy director of Learning and Engagement at the Guggenheim Museum, as announced last week. - Hyperallergic

A motion from Congresswoman Joyce Beatty (D-OH), a member of the Center’s board who’s suing to prevent its closure, is requesting financial and other records as part of discovery. As Trump is chairman of the Kennedy Center board, the Justice Department argues that these records are protected by executive privilege. - Forbes

"I was a vice president at that arts center in Washington, and I can tell you that maintenance is almost certainly not why it closed its doors last month." - Los Angeles Times (Yahoo)

“Rising from $5,000 to up to $10,000, the increase … represents the first change in this funding stream in some 20 years. The funding comes from the Department of Cultural Affairs and is distributed to each borough’s arts councils, which act as regrant partners and dole out grants to individual artists annually.” - ARTnews

The Bronzeville Legacy Collective says it has already raised $75 million toward its goal: a campus with museums dedicated to the gospel music, blues legend Muddy Waters, and Emmett Till; a center for Black dance; a theater with a resident company; a recreational trail; and an arts and culture center. - WBEZ (Chicago)

Physical media are really making a comeback in the era of streaming services removing series and movies at (seemingly) random, book censorship, and AI music. - The Guardian (UK)

Harmonium, founded by pianist and conductor Jeffrey Kahane after he stepped down as the Philharmonic’s music director earlier this year, begins its orchestral life Friday at the Lila Cockrell Theatre. Its emergence poses an unusual question: when an orchestra disappears, who — if anyone — inherits it? - San Antonio Current

Harmonium of Texas — made up largely of musicians from the long-defunct San Antonio Symphony and the now-probably-defunct San Antonio Philharmonic, and co-founded by former SA Phil music director Jeffrey Kahane — gave its first performance on Friday, three days after what’s left of the Philharmonic sued Harmonium. - San Antonio Express-News (Yahoo!)

The gift will allow the symphony to resume the season, which runs through June 2027, and to retain staff, Mark Tillinger, Nashville Symphony’s president and chief executive, said in a news release on Sunday. - The New York Times

The consequences have reverberated across the country. Higher instrument prices are a particular threat to lower-income districts where enrollment and budgets are shrinking. - The New York Times

Instead, it brought classical music to much wider audiences, especially during and just after WWII. - Classical Music (BBC)

For Liz Harris, "an elevated digital profile comes with a range of new concerns – like fake remixes and songs posted with the same titles as hers by bad actors trying to skim whatever royalties they can." - The Guardian (UK)

As part of the £1.5 million research partnership, Humanise said it wants to "challenge the 'blandemic' of dull, soulless development" and improve the way the UK designs and builds its urban environments. - Dezeen

The large bronze plate, inlaid with precious stones and seashells, was taken from the Centre d'art contemporain in Issoire in south-central France. The piece is the cover of the Livre de l'Apocalypse, a joint project of 14 painters and writers including Dalí, Cocteau, and Cioran, calligraphed and illuminated on parchment. - The Telegraph (UK)...

The Victoria and Albert Museum is “planning to launch a voluntary exit scheme … open to staff across the museum. … (The plan) does not reveal how many employees will apply or be accepted. No savings target, opening date, closing date, departmental allocation, or exit terms have been published.” - Art in Context

The striking, €45m project in which Foster + Partners has worked with the eminent Basque architect Luis María Uriarte, has been described as a “floating pavilion” and will double the current exhibition space in the museum, to around 6,000 sq. m, and will also remodel 8,000 sq. m of existing galleries. - The Art...

Conservators face a particular challenge: how to ensure that preserving the past does not compromise the future. - The Art Newspaper

Featuring elegant proportions, hand-carved cornicing, expansive stone doorsteps and porches, and with a flourish of columns, this house and others like it have all been built in recent years – but without a backstory of beheaded queens or servant entourages. Welcome to the world of houses built to look like they've always been there....

“On Thursday, the Amazon-owned company introduced three new features that will allow listeners to explore a book’s characters, engage in interactive stories, and view additional imagery and bonus information about landmarks or places mentioned in the book.” Unfortunately, for now this all is available with only one title. - TechCrunch

“In … peer-reviewed journal Digital Medievalist, (two researchers) argue that the manuscript’s folded sheets may have originally been piled on top of each other as ‘singulions’ – like a stack of Christmas cards – but were mis-bound in a more typical ‘nested’ arrangement at some point in the mid-to-late 15th century.” - The Guardian

What are those commas doing there, anyway? By modern usage, they should mark off a non-restrictive clause, but they don’t. Nor are they marking items in a series or natural pauses in speech.  - The New Yorker

That is ... not going well (though romance readers are still gaga for M/M, W/W, and M/W hockey tales from more traditional channels). Fans "see the stories as cheap pandering that fails to engage with female and LGBTQ hockey fans’ concerns about homophobia and toxic masculinity in the sport." - Wired

As Substack has become a more respectable platform and mainstream academics have begun to join in some numbers, they have encountered a strange simulacrum of fields they thought they knew intimately. Cultural and symbolic capital seem to work differently here. - Paroxysms

"When you put your finger on every single book in order to type it into a spreadsheet, you really do think, ‘Am I willing to lose my job over this particular book?’ ... I think that is a real concern for teachers around the state." - The 74

Disney lawyers asked a judge in U.S. District Court in Washington to bar the F.C.C. from undertaking an unusual, early review of the broadcast licenses of the eight stations the company owns and operates. - The New York Times

While the lawsuits differ, they all claim the smear campaigns were carried out through anonymous websites, fabricated social media posts or promotion of unflattering articles and posts on the internet.  - The New York Times

You paid for the building with your bonds. You paid for the programming with your pledge drives. You paid the $447,529 salary with your donations. What you got: a 2.0 share, phantom metrics, and eleven million in programming money nobody can itemize. - Gregg Lewis

“The New York magazine business is a really unique model in that world,” James said. “They didn’t go down the road of just search engine optimization and serving all that sort of stuff that we’ve seen other magazines do. They’ve really doubled down on the commitment to this thoughtful long-form journalism.” - Vanity Fair

“People used to compare the experience of watching prestige TV shows like The Sopranos to reading a great Victorian novel. By the same token, we can say that watching a microdrama is like being electrocuted onstage at the circus.” But what’s it like for the people making these things? - The New York Times...

The move to dismiss the members came days after a survey conducted by the board showed support for Alabama Public Television continuing its relationship with the Public Broadcasting Service. Last October, two conservative members of the board brought the idea of disaffiliating from PBS. Barnett accused PBS of being “anathema” to President Donald Trump....

“In the 1980s Margot Fonteyn told me her technique as Britain’s most celebrated ballerina was far inferior to that of any young dancer starting out in the Eighties. ‘And today the technical accomplishment is far greater than it was 40 years ago,’ (Royal Ballet School artistic director Iain) Mackay tells me.” - The Times...

DDP’s latest data set shows half of the creative teams commissioned for new dance works are entirely male. Less than 10 percent have an equal proportion of men and women. All-women teams are rare. “It basically proves what people have known for a long time,” says DDP founder Elizabeth “Liza” Yntema.  - Dance Magazine

“This is absolutely the city — audiences, presenters, critics — that knows me best” he said. “And there is no denying that eyes will be on how I have guided and how I am presenting the company that I have directed for six years.” - The New York Times

One man is trying to change that.  "You can come down with your blankets, your tablets, your headphones. You don’t have to be in regalia. You can have your caregivers with you. You can have your parents with you, a support person or persons." - OPB

“This year’s Dance Magazine Awards will honor Germaine Acogny; Ayodele Casel; Final Bow for Yellowface; Cleo Parker Robinson; and Alice Sheppard. The Lydia Joel Award — recognizing behind-the-scenes dance leaders — will go to Alicia Adams, formerly of the Kennedy Center.” - Dance Magazine

“Yes, I am a ballet outsider. I don’t have all the ballet steps at my fingertips but I have a list of ballet steps and I go through them like a laundry list and experiment. … It’s hard to separate the two systems now. I have my own ideas no matter what.” - The...

“Elizabeth Williamson, … 47, currently serves as artistic director of Geva Theatre in Rochester, N.Y., and previously held leadership positions at Hartford Stage in Connecticut and Pioneer Theatre Company in Utah.” - San Francisco Chronicle (MSN)

“Staging that key three minutes of the show's meticulously choreographed, highly anticipated climax is a technical feat involving more than 100 gallons of water and unwavering physical acumen on the part of the cast.” - Los Angeles Times (Yahoo!)

But Hamilton plays differently now. "The show was written in a time where hope was what we were striving for, holding on to, and the pandemic did a lot to diminish that and exhaust people and scare people." - The New York Times

"Theater is so hard to do for so many reasons," says one actor in the renovated Olney Theatre. He's pleased "to see an actual new facility come up out of the ground, and to see talent and audience members come into this space and relish in the experience.”  - Washington Post

She was laughing, but the X-Files (and current Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf) star told her fans, "It's so distracting. You can't come 20 times and sit in the front row, it's driving me mad." - The Telegraph (Yahoo)

“Bill Pay itself was extremely meta and self-aware, a post-postmodern pageant that would have given David Foster Wallace an aneurysm. … (It) felt like an indicator of where the broader cultural zeitgeist is headed: back to a not-so-recent past where wealthy companies devoted heaping shares of their budgets toward sheer pandering.” - Slate (Yahoo!)

Botstein, embattled and polarizing, has held on. He has continued to teach at Bard, the liberal arts college 100 miles north of New York City. (He is on sabbatical now to complete a book on Mahler.) He remains the artistic co-director of the Bard Music Festival and runs The Orchestra Now. - The New...

“A multifaceted actress, Ms. Saint combined the luminous dazzle of a fashion model with the subtle and textured depths of a seasoned dramatic performer. She drew the admiration of some of the biggest directors of the 1950s and 1960s, including Alfred Hitchcock, Elia Kazan, John Frankenheimer and Otto Preminger.” - The Washington Post (MSN)

“Often in repeated partnerships with directors such as Stephen Frears, Ken Loach, Nora Ephron, Richard Attenborough, Nicholas Hytner and Neil Jordan, Fenton amassed a large and remarkable body of work that stretched across more than 100 feature films, plus documentary, theatre, TV news and more.” - The Guardian

“Possessed of huge drive, vast wealth and immense personal charm, Archer bounced back from disaster and, more than once, rebuilt a shattered life. But for all his talents, he will be remembered as a man affected by a defective moral compass, whose public humiliation was entirely self-inflicted.” - BBC (MSN)

Mazzullo was "an Italian actor who for more than 40 years provided the endearing voice of the floppy-eared mouse puppet Topo Gigio, a TV character beloved by children all over the world," not to mention by Ed Sullivan. - The New York Times

Errázuriz was "a patron, adviser, connector and tastemaker whose influence expanded beyond Picasso and Stravinsky to fashion and interior design. She ... opened doors, offered criticism and used her considerable wealth to steer artists toward the work that would make them famous." - The New York Times