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

"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)

In addition to established understandings of intrinsic esthetic and historic values of heritage, new emphasis on development reconceptualizes heritage as a resource that can generate economic development, tourism, employment and social cohesion. - The Conversation

The pavilion reopened partway through the 2026 summer season after two seasons of design and construction, then quickly began demonstrating its newfound flexibility. - Architect Magazine

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)

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....

The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation clearly doesn’t think so: not only has it listed the Soho building he bought in 1966, it has already sold the house on Florida’s Captiva Island where he spent his final decades. (A resort developer bought that property for $45 million.) - The New York Times

“Under the new contract, every Whitney employee will receive a wage increase of at least 14.75% over four years. Workers with the lowest salaries will receive larger raises, ranging from 5% to 23% in the first year.” The settlement came in time to avoid disruption of the museum’s major Roy Lichtenstein retrospective. - ARTnews

The goal is to allow the public and scholars to both search the institution’s collection and draw connections across the Smithsonian and other organizations, such as the Library of Congress, to gain a deeper sense of how communities formed and functioned at the nation’s birth. - AP News

“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

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....

“Direct traffic is taking a larger share, internal recirculation is up and private sharing through texts, DMs and apps like WhatsApp has surged. Meanwhile, publishers’ most loyal readers are generating more pageviews than they did two years ago. The catch: Publishers are attracting fewer new readers.” - A Media Operator

"In the coming weeks, NAZA will continue its rollout to theaters across the U.S., and this week it hit No. 1 at the Italian box office, surpassing Avengers: Endgame." - Vulture

"Nithya Raman comes by her Hollywood bona fides honestly. Her husband, after all, is Vali Chandrasekaran, writer on Modern Family, 30 Rock and other TV hits." - The Hollywood Reporter

Prestige movies don't reliably make money on streaming. "It seems like Netflix’s main game plan is to put an increased focus on producing lower-budget series, live events, and sports programming." - The Verge

"Almost every 3D technology cuts something you care about in half, whether it’s resolution ... or the refresh rate and flicker you get with active shutter glasses. But what if you had a full screen for each eye? That’s what video glasses can provide." - The Verge

“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...

“Kyle Abraham’s company is now officially the Kyle Abraham Dance Vanguard. It’s not the first time the contemporary troupe has changed names: Abraham launched it in 2005 as Abraham.In.Motion, later revising it to A.I.M by Kyle Abraham in 2019.” - Dance Magazine

A Florence-based nonprofit, the New Generation Foundation, is backing the company, called the Nouveaux Ballets Russes. Parish, a Briton who was until 2022 a principal at Russia's Mariinsky Theater, is artistic director, and he aims, as Diaghilev did, to engage collaborators in the vanguard of art, music, tech, and fashion. - Pointe Magazine

“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!)

The Yard opened in an old industrial estate in July 2011; it was supposed to be a three-month pop-up but stayed for 14 years, presenting edgy stagings of classics and new work — and occasionally sending a production on to the National Theatre. Now it’s reopening after a £7 million renovation. - The Nerve...

“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

She's felt a pretty big responsibility, honestly, and she's proud of the film Girls Like Girls. "We go to watch movies to dream and to fantasise and to see representation that maybe we lack in our lives.” - The Guardian (UK)

Nothing, actually. “No, I'm happy with what I knew then and what I didn't know, and I was glad to get a chance to be an idiot. … You know, I don't mind making these blunders. I learned a lot through blunders.” - The Nerve (UK)

“A federal judge on Wednesday threw out much of Baldwin‘s civil rights lawsuit against prosecutors in the Rust case, finding they are entitled to prosecutorial immunity. Baldwin sued last year, alleging he was the victim of an out-of-control prosecution that wrongly sought to convict him for the accidental shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins in 2021.” - Variety