Stories

The Machine That Gave Birth To Mass Media

Before the late 1800s, printers had to arrange letters one-by-one on metal plates, a slow and painstaking process. Media maven Jeff Jarvis points out that, once the Linotype machine appeared toward the end of the 19th century, books and periodicals could be printed quickly enough to meet booming public demand. - The Christian Science Monitor

UK Artist Visas Are Being Sold Fraudulently

Several companies have been helping migrants apply for UK visas under the government’s Global Talent program by creating fake art portfolios, complete with fake published art criticism and art news. - ARTnews

Will A SciFi Booker Win Bring More Attention To The Genre?

Author and critic Olivia Laing agrees it’s taken the literary world “an embarrassingly long time to clock that you don’t need realism to write about how it feels to inhabit late capitalism and unravelling modernity”.  - The Guardian

Three-Day Strike At French Riviera’s Leading Opera House

The number-one issue for the choristers, instrumentalists, and ballet dancers at the Opéra de Nice is low pay. Union spokespeople say some of their members net as little as €1,600 a month — in a resort city where housing costs are unusually high. - Riviera Radio (Monaco)

Are We Scapegoating Our Phones?

Against the suggestion that the furor over phones is no different from past outcries over new technologies, some point to novel features of social media—exploitative algorithms or “infinite scrolling”—to argue that this case is different.  - Boston Review

Artnet Makes Controversial Partnership With Kalshi

On Wednesday, Artnet announced that it had partnered with Kalshi, the prediction-market platform that lets users bet on everything from election results to sporting events. Artnet will become Kalshi’s official art partner, helping select markets and supplying the auction data used to determine which bets pay out. - ARTnews

How Aztec Historians Saved Their People’s History From Spanish Bonfires

There were codices of Nahuatl hieroglyphics before the conquistadors arrived, but they were all either burned by militant Catholic priests or lost to time. Secretly, though, indigenous scholars collected oral history and wrote it down, usually in Nahuatl using the Spanish alphabet, and a surprising amount has survived until today. - History Today

Indonesian Copyright Bill Would Require Payment For News Aggregation From Tech Companies

The bill does not distinguish between aggregation and republication. Tech platforms would have to pay even when they surface news link previews or story snippets in their products, including AI search products. The law would also force platforms to compensate publishers when their journalism is used to train AI models. - NiemanLab

Refugees And The Imagination Of Borders

Each of us had imagined a life that exceeded the border and acted upon that imagination. In that sense, the prison did not simply contain border-crossers; it brought together people whose aspirations had collided with the territorial imaginary of the nation-state. - Aeon

Shady Companies Make Fake Portfolios For Rich Migrants Who Want UK “Global Talent” Visas

For a hefty fee, these companies will fabricate forged portfolios, with fake images of work and forged review clips, for applications for the Global Talent visa, which can lead to permanent residency in three to five years and is one of a very few UK visas which doesn’t require demonstrated fluency in English. - BBC

What It Looks Like When The Internet Stops Working

Your bank’s app is down. The pharmacy cannot pull up your prescription. Your paycheck is late because the payroll company unplugged its system to be safe. None of it is a catastrophe on its own. All of it, every week, is a different country from the one we live in now. - Washington Post

Exporting Paris Opera Ballet To The World

“For me, the French school of ballet is the best in the world. Thanks to this program, our ballet school in Santiago has been transformed — not just in terms of its technique, but in terms of its way of thinking.” - The New York Times

Kennedy Center Switches Ticket-Buying To TicketMaster

For decades, the Kennedy Center has used a not-for-profit platform called Tessitura to handle its ticketing. But the Kennedy Center plans to partner with the ticketing behemoth Ticketmaster. - NPR

When Postmodern Dance Meets Ping-Pong

“Those quarter-size Ping-Pong tables can be merged to make half-size or full-size ones, and that’s a pretty good metaphor for what (choreographer Cherrie Yu’s) Daily Diversions does: It takes Ping-Pong apart and puts it back together.” - The New York Times

Novelist, Filmmaker, And Photographer To Stand Trial For Selling Looted Gold Ingots

“Eleanor ‘Gay’ Courter, an author of best-selling fiction, nonfiction, and memoir; her husband, Philip Courter, a film director; Yves Gladu, a professional underwater photographer; his wife, Brigitte; and his sister-in-law, Annette May Pesty, have been charged with conspiracy. Some also face charges of money laundering and receiving stolen goods.” (All are over 75.) - ARTnews

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