“That has been the biggest surprise, just how fast corporate and foundation America has closed its doors and is reducing the size and scope of the public conversation on important issues like freedom, justice, diversity, healthcare, relationships, economics, and just about everything else.” - Hyperallergic
Everything hobbyists love - from graphic novels to BluRays to vinyl to, yes, yarn - is in a constant state of flux and higher prices thanks to the U.S. president’s "tariff bonanza.” - Slate
A prominent human rights lawyer warns that “when a political leader tries to ‘capture culture' it's something ... typical of an authoritarian. ‘Right by the playbook.’” - CBC
And now that backsliding is more like an avalanche crushing BIPOC creators of any gender — and women of all races and ethnicities — as the rush to the bottom speeds up under the current U.S. president. - Los Angeles Times (MSN)
Perhaps the most beautiful part of this digital heist is that all of this knowledge is being stolen in broad daylight. Napster was a rather minor and petty crime in comparison. - The Guardian
A nation’s “soft power” is “the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments” — foreign aid, public perception, and especially cultural exports such as movies and music. American soft power has been enormous, and Lily Janiak considers how it's being frittered away. - San Francisco Chronicle (MSN)
The lawsuit argues that the new requirement — that grant applicants must affirm that their projects will not “promote gender ideology” — violates the First and Fifth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution and the Administrative Procedure Act. - The Guardian
Cheryl Hickman, artistic director of Opera on the Avalon, will start a five-year term in July as chairperson of the federal Crown corporation the Canada Council for the Arts. - CBC
The play was Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, produced in 1996 by the Charlotte Repertory Theatre. Here’s the story of the fight about it started by a fundamentalist minister, the legal mechanism used to shut the play down, and the decades-long aftereffects of the debacle. - Charlotte Magazine
The integration of AI and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) proved especially powerful. SAR technology provides high-resolution images of structures buried beneath the earth's surface, capable of penetrating natural barriers such as sand, vegetation, and ice. - Jerusalem Post
After years of either cuts or stagnant funding, the New York City Council has allocated $4 million for arts instruction and programming in 239 schools (which is not all of them) across the city — all of $16,257 per school. - PIX11 (New York City)
To judge by the number of papers I read last semester that were clearly AI generated, a lot of students are enthusiastic about this latest innovation. It turns out, too, this enthusiasm is hardly dampened by, say, a clear statement in one’s syllabus prohibiting the use of AI. - The Walrus
Even beyond their economic potential, the cultural value of practices more traditionally associated with commercial activity has become more central to the national conversation. - The Conversation
Visibility is only part of the equation. Who controls it? How are cultural narratives shaped? What systems determine access? If we don’t ask these questions, we risk treating discoverability as just another distribution challenge, rather than a fundamental issue of power, representation, and digital agency. - Linked.In
Harvard is the flagship of American higher education ...and what started as a crisis of speech and authority on campus has grown into a fear that internal conflict, amplified by outside pressures, can run it and the whole fleet of American universities aground. - The New Yorker
