The climate crisis has caused devastated cacao farming in West Africa, causing huge price spikes and volatility in the cocoa commodity market — leading companies like Hershey’s and Cadbury, which manufacture inexpensive chocolate products for ordinary consumers, to start using other ingredients. - The Guardian
By some measures, there are as many as 1 million books published annually in the US, and it’s a number that doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. The result is that there is intense competition for the small slice of the review landscape that remains. - Book Work
Every year, over 400 church organs in the UK alone are sent to the junkyard or become unplayable due to neglect. The organization Pipe Up is rescuing some of those instruments which can be made playable at relatively little expense, then sending them to new owners ranging from London to the Philippines. - BBC (Yahoo!)
Combining machine learning, deep neural networks and computer vision algorithms, Art Recognition’s approach can, in theory, be adapted to any painter with a big enough back catalog. To date, the company has produced models for more than 200 artists. - CNN
The recovery, however, came with an asterisk. While auctions bounced back strongly, galleries barely budged, and much of the market’s growth came from a small number of very expensive works. - ARTnews
According to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in the summer of 2025, 53% of U.S. adults said they had seen a movie in theaters in the prior 12 months. A small but notable 7% said they had never seen a movie in a theater at all. - Variety
“A lost page from the Archimedes Palimpsest, among the oldest sources for the Greek mathematician in existence, has been discovered … at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Blois. The page in question contains geometric diagrams and a passage from Archimedes’s treatise on the sphere and the cylinder, hidden beneath a layer of later religious writings.” - Artnet
Whatever their mission and wherever their location, what the stations have in common is the amplification — literally and metaphorically — of women’s voices to create a community that might not otherwise exist, on-air or off. - NiemanLab
Nearly every major pianist of the early 20th century made music for these machines. Echoing AI commentary today, some musicians viewed the player piano as not just replicating human playing, but exceeding it. - The Atlantic
The strikes on Isfahan on Monday came a week after another cultural icon, the Golestan Palace, was badly damaged during an attack on a police station in downtown Tehran, according to the ministry. - The New York Times
For two decades, NCI has offered four young choreographers the chance to spend three weeks creating works on professional dancers. In a Q&A, artistic director Molly Lynch talks about the initiative and why it is ending. - L.A. Dance Chronicle
Access Fringe program at the Melbourne Fringe Festival is a 10-year partnership with Arts Access Victoria supporting d/Deaf and disabled artists through commissions, mentorships and specialised development programs. The initiative shows how embedding access into every space and conversation can lead to change across the entire cultural sector. - ArtsHub
Right now though, it’s anyone’s guess where the “future vision” of the BSO will take them – and if the relationship between the players and the board is in the state of disrepair it seems to be, this could become a Premier League style story of power, vanity and ingloriousness. Oh dear. - The Guardian
For all of the egregious consent violations in the film industry that the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements shone a light on, I was heartened by what I heard about artist care from the independent filmmakers, and I believe that there’s much that theatre can learn from them. - American Theatre
Though The New York Times has described him as “a rock star among architects,” he’s not as famous as previous “starchitect” winners such as Frank Gehry, I.M. Pei, and Zaha Hadid. In fact, Radić says that this award “will probably mean being far more exposed than I would like.” - NPR
