The opera, which announced it was severing its relations with the Kennedy Center as President Trump sought to put his imprint on the institution, said it would produce five full-length operas — including a world premiere based on the life of Georgia O’Keeffe — and three smaller-scale works on five stages across the region. - The New York Times
“The magic of creator, lead actor, and bass-baritone Davóne Tines’s operatic adaption of Langston Hughes’s 1931 dramatic monologue The Black Clown lies in its everythingness. (The) poem … consolidates 300 years of the Black American experience into 18 emotional stanzas.” - The Philadelphia Inquirer (MSN)
I’ve written previously that one of AI’s enduring cultural impacts is to make people feel like they’re losing their mind. But lately, I believe, it’s the accelerated nature of the AI boom that’s driving people everywhere mad. - The Atlantic
“For nearly three decades Cuba’s Danza Voluminosa regularly filled prestigious venues like the 2,000-seat National Theater. Directed by Juan Miguel Mas, the troupe pioneered a new movement by working exclusively with larger-bodied dancers. ... (Now) Mas’s daily life has been upended by persistent blackouts, water outages, soaring costs and a lack of transportation.” - AP
The seller of the 1957 work, “Brown and Blacks in Reds,” was the estate of former Goldman Sachs banker turned art dealer Robert Mnuchin, who paid $6.7 million for the work in 2003. The winning telephone bidder at Sotheby’s was anonymous. - The Wall Street Journal
There are no such stable beliefs and desires “inside” us that can be observed and reported. Instead, the human mind is a wonderfully fluent, but profoundly deceptive, improviser: spinning stories justifying our thoughts and actions as fast as we ask questions. And these invented explanations are vague, inconsistent, and often provably wrong. - IAI News
“The estranged husband of a prominent New York City art dealer said he wished his spouse was dead before the co-owner of a contemporary art gallery was found stabbed to death in his Brazilian townhouse, a witness testified Tuesday as a murder-for-hire trial got underway in Manhattan.” - AP
If you do look closely at the history, biography, memoir, and general-nonfiction honors, a noticeable pattern emerges. The picks typically share a particular quality. - The Atlantic
“The current system of unpaid reviews undermines the standards of the peer-review process. It produces late reviews and excludes large segments of the research community who cannot afford to work for free. If you have a financial commitment from the reviewer, it creates a lever for expecting quality. Payment creates accountability, not corruption.” - InsideHigherEd
People born between 1997 and 2012 are now more frequent cinemagoers than some older age groups, according to a US-based survey by Fandango, with 87% having seen at least one film in a cinema in the last 12 months compared with 58% of baby boomers. - The Guardian
The Wellcome Collection is ceding ownership of more than 2,000 documents, dating from the 15th to 19th centuries, bought from a Jain temple in present-day Pakistan in 1919. Now deeming the purchase of the manuscripts “unethical,” the museum is turning them over to the UK-based Institute of Jainology. - The Telegraph (UK) (Yahoo!)
A recent preprint study provides evidence that while these tools might boost individual performance, they contribute to an overall reduction in the diversity of ideas across different users. - PsyPost
“Roots” is a multi-generational story following the descendants of a man sold into slavery in the United States. It won the Pulitzer Prize and was adapted into a mini-series. There is a statue of Haley in East Knoxville. - WATE
The “Greatest Living Songwriters” list was dumb clickbait which omitted an entire pantheon of irreplaceably brilliant songwriters. But the thing I most lament is the loss of a critical landscape in which you could open up the paper each morning and read six reviews of weird shows on the Lower East Side. - Gabrial Kahane
