Stories

Top Hollywood Exec Pay Rose 51 Percent As Industry Shed 17,000 Jobs

The total compensation for the top executives surged a stunning 51% from a year earlier, based on a tally of $615 million vs. $408.5 million in 2024.  - The Wrap

ESPN Meets The Savannah Bananas’ Choreographer

“Maceo Harrison deftly designs routines that emphasize charisma over technical precision and spotlight the teams' natural showmen while camouflaging the players with two left feet. ... Sometimes he has mere hours to choreograph and just as little time to teach his routines to the players.” - ESPN

The Art Looter Who Supplied Museums

Latchford’s success depended not just on criminal networks that supplied and transported these objects, but on the willingness of museums, dealers, collectors, and scholars to accept fragmented or problematic provenance so long as the objects themselves retained the aura of rarity and beauty. - Hyperallergic

Universities Rethink The SAT

“We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics, and other quantitatively demanding fields,” the professors write in an open letter to the Board of Regents. - The Wall Street Journal

Summing Up Dudamel’s Time With The LA Philharmonic

Unlike his immediate predecessor, Esa-Pekka Salonen, who also served as the Philharmonic’s music director for 17 seasons, Mr. Dudamel seems not to have matured on the podium. - The Wall Street Journal

Hudson Valley Shakespeare Finally Has A Real Theater Building

Designed by award-winning architects Studio Gang, the 451-seat Scripps Theater Center — in Garrison, NY, 60 miles north of New York City — is a curved mass-timber structure with open sides, set on 98 landscaped acres overlooking the Hudson River. Year-round facilities will let the festival expand beyond a summer schedule. - Time Out New York

FCC Action Against ABC Is A Threat To Free Speech, Says Disney

“The order is inconsistent with a legitimate exercise of investigative authority and is plainly incompatible with the First Amendment,” Disney said in its Thursday filing. Carr has insisted the early renewal order is strictly about DEI. - The Wall Street Journal

Looking At 100s Of Thousands Of College Essays: AI Flattens Creativity

This seems to be especially true for students. A.I.’s smooth sentences, elegant transitions and rich vocabulary give the illusion of expansive creativity and individuality. But the underlying ideas often converge into a few homogenized categories. - The New York Times

Gehry Partners Will Work On Renovation Of The Getty Center

Gehry Partners will design a variety of upgrades to the Getty Center — including a major revamp of its entry experience — during its upcoming year-long closure, the museum announced Thursday. - Los Angeles Times

English Can Be A Weird Language. That’s Why It’s Perfect For Competitive Spelling Bees.

Sure, there are some other languages whose speakers have spelling contests, but there are plenty — Italian, Finnish, Malay, etc. — whose words are spelled exactly as they’re pronounced. But English? In what other language could “ough” be pronounced eight different ways, depending on the word? - The New York Times Magazine

The Publishing Industry Is Very Vulnerable To AI

The book-publishing industry had already been wrestling with the prospect of a flood of AI-authored texts in the fiction market, and now the Rosenbaum scandal was showing the way AI could blow a hole in the nonfiction sector, too. - New York Magazine

YouTube Will Start Labeling AI Video

YouTube is making AI-generated content labels more prominent for viewers — and it’s going to start automatically applying the labels if it detects that a video includes “significant photorealistic AI use.” - Variety

Science: Yes, Pianists Can Control Sound By Their Touch

Their findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), suggest that the subtle motions of a pianist's fingers and hands influence how listeners perceive qualities such as brightness, heaviness, and clarity in musical notes. - Science Daily

Smithsonian Chief Lonnie Bunch Has Curated A New Exhibit About America’s Ideals. He Thinks It May Be His Last Show.

“(He) did not set out to make the exhibit American Aspirations his swan song. But he said that his organizing of an exhibition that honors America’s 250th anniversary could well be among his final acts as secretary. ‘It’s probably the last exhibit I will curate, there’s no doubt about that.’” - The New York Times

England’s Arts Funding Body Changes Its Criteria To Re-Focus On “Excellence”

Arts Council England has unveiled a new strategy to replace the “Let’s Create” regime, which was widely criticized for appearing to de-emphasize high quality in favor of inclusiveness. The new policy aims for ACE’s grants to “support excellence, deliver for everybody, and reach everywhere.” - The Stage (UK)

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