Even a president as attuned to the details of Kennedy Center programming as Nixon didn’t try to directly take a hand in running the place. As in so many other instances in the last month, it’s remarkable how little opposition Trump has encountered in setting out to do whatever he wants. - Van
"At stake: the immortality conferred on those who make a once-in-a-century intellectual breakthrough. Three men — driven by boundless curiosity, a love of risk, and the distinctive demons of aspiration and ambition — were most responsible for making the contest possible." - Smithsonian Magazine
We must recognise that the natural and the mental order of things go hand in hand. Neither can be fully understood without the other. And neither can be traced back to the other. - Aeon
Events have moved quickly since Thursday night when Creative Australia sensationally dumped the Sydney-based multimedia artist Khaled Sabsabi as the nation’s representative for the 2026 edition of the Venice Biennale. - The Art Newspaper
The word "run" has 645 definitions just as a verb (plus others as a noun), and it took an Oxford English Dictionary lexicographer nine months working them all out and writing them up. (The two runners-up for greatest number of definitions are also three-letter verbs.) - Mental Floss
Pressures from the Trump administration threaten an already beleaguered research enterprise that historically has thrived on doing basic research with minimal influence from partisan politics and industry profit-seeking. - Post Alley
In 2020, Thomson Reuters sued Ross Intelligence for copyright infringement, alleging that Ross had scraped Thomson Reuters’ own law database, known as Westlaw, to create its database, and that this amounted to copyright infringement. - Music Business Worldwide
Before it burned, Charlie Springer’s house contained 18,000 vinyl LPs, 12,000 CDs, 10,000 45s, 4,000 cassettes, 600 78s, 150 8-tracks, hundreds of signed musical posters, and about 100 gold records. - The Atlantic
Recent years have seen a surge in options for physical customization of the piano and an enormous leap forward in the merging of acoustic and digital technologies, with AI applications cracking open a Pandora's box of possibilities. - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
The problem is that this was really an ideas competition, with entrants expected to produce not detailed designs but rather a flavour of what visitors might expect, perhaps in a couple of decades’ time. It’s a curious beginning... - Apollo
The FCC's Brendan Carr this week leaked word to right wing propaganda mill Newsmax that he’s tasked the FCC’s enforcement bureau with launching an investigation into whether Comcast is breaking any laws (they’re not) by still having references to diversity initiatives on their website. - Techdirt
Carolina Actors Studio Theatre (CAST) in Charlotte was founded in 1992 and won numerous regional awards; in 2014, it abruptly announced its closure shortly before opening night of a production. CAST is reopening at the end of this month; here's how the company's revival came together. - The Charlotte Observer
"This marks the first such all-encompassing renovation since the iconic park, with its Prairie School architecture and sprawling lawn/picnic areas, opened in 1904 as a summertime 'high-end amusement park' and music-venue escape from the congestion of Chicago at the turn of the century." - WBEZ (Chicago)
"(The) public radio and television station based in Springfield, Mass. laid off 13% of its employees on Wednesday. It's the station’s second round of layoffs since 2023, when it cut a fifth of its staff and eliminated its weekly public affairs television show Connecting Point." - WBUR (Boston)
