Since The Onion took over Alex Jones’s rabidly right-wing media property and turned it into a parody of itself, the brand has gotten hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok. What could have been a one-note joke has become a real business, with viewership exceeding Jones’s own. - TheWrap (Yahoo!)
Microdramas may be the only thing that’s growing in Hollywood. The format is expected to generate $1.5 billion in revenue in the U.S. this year and jump to nearly $2 billion next year, according to research firm Omdia. - Reuters
In a new paper in Nature Machine Intelligence, three University of Cambridge researchers used AI to help better define the musical tics of 20 of the most celebrated jazz pianists of all time. - Scientific American
The museum promised to “bring the museum to you,” and it has delivered not only with its extensive digital collection, free for downloading, sharing and editing with a free Rijksmuseum account, but also with informative series on its website. - Open Culture
Canadian baritone Philippe Sly, currently starring in the Salzburg Festival’s production of Messiaen’s six-hour opera St. François d’Assise, is staying at the Kapuzinerkloster, a monastery across the Salzach River from the venue, eating with them in the refectory and attending every prayer service he’s available for. - The New York Times
ByteDance and the Motion Picture Association on Monday signed an agreement to strengthen copyright safeguards on the Chinese company's AI video and image-generation models, months after the Hollywood trade group challenged its handling of intellectual property. - Reuters
The amount of fiction people read seems to be a better predictor of language ability than nonfiction, research finds. And, perhaps even more importantly, research has found that fiction is linked to better social cognition and an increased understanding of the world as a complex place. - Washington Post
Curators at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles have taken those variations as an invitation to judgment. In a series of recent social media posts, the museum is rating the appearances of art-adjacent emojis across different platforms and operating systems, leavening scholarly expertise with a liberal sprinkling of cheek. - The New York Times
Either human speech and AI speech progressively assimilate, causing a collapse in any meaningful distinction, or language becomes a contested social signal. This second scenario would essentially be a game of whack-a-mole across the English language. - Washington Post
“This crisis largely seems unconcerned with serious musical issues, such as the quality of the playing and the choice of repertoire.” Lloyd Schwartz reminds us that those issues are what really matter here — and that they don’t militate in Andris Nelsons’s favor. - WBUR (Boston)
Matt Dinan, of St. Thomas University in New Brunswick, Canada, had somehow never read the Dostoevsky classic before last semester. He found himself completely consumed by the novel — and then found his students equally taken with it. The reasons they gave for being so excited were telling. - The New York Times
Powerhouse Paramatta, a 915 million AUD (US$650 million) museum of applied design and technology, will be Western Sydney’s first major cultural institution. It will open to the public this November 7. - Time Out Sydney
“Audiences at the Bolshoi Theatre could find themselves without 11 of its most well-known productions – among them The Nutcracker, Swan Lake, Giselle, Spartacus and Ivan the Terrible – after a dispute over the rights to Yuri Grigorovich‘s choreographic legacy escalated into a criminal fraud investigation.” - Gramilano
After decades, the last US national tour of the Broadway production has ended, meaning that regional companies can get the rights to produce the show themselves and bring in that sweet. sweet, desperately needed box office revenue. And those companies have wasted no time getting started. - The New York Times
