“The venerable Chicago-based improvisational comedy institution has quietly built out a surprising side-hustle: Using the fundamentals and tactics of improv to teach corporate executives and professional athletes how to be better communicators.” - The Hollywood Reporter
Steppenwolf is embarking on its 50 anniversary season as one of America’s pre-eminent theater companies. An invitation to join its storied ensemble — a familial coterie of actors, directors and writers — is a golden ticket. - The New York Times
Hearings continue in NPR’s lawsuit to block the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s distribution of $57.9 million to the newly formed Public Media Infrastructure (PMI). - InsideRadio
The house was designed to look like a domestic residence, not like the palace of a king or the compound of an autocrat or a dictator. It was meant to look like domestic architecture. - NPR
Wayne McGregor worked with a Google Arts & Culture Lab team to develop a choreographic language agent called AISOMA — a tool that can create and reiterate phrases and movements from a huge repository of dance data. He's also created a pas de deux which audience members watch inside a circular 12K LED screen. - Financial Times
In an attempt to cater to evolving tastes, bring in as many attendees as possible and expose the next generation to ballet, Pittsburgh Ballet has been programming productions that tap into popular stories to help sell tickets. - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
The trajectory of intelligent life on this planet can be described as an evolution of verbs: to move, to reproduce, to hunt, to hide, to feel, to make, to use, to think. With the rise of artificial intelligence and competent chatbots, experts have opined about which verbs matter for what counts as “intelligence.” - LA Review of Books
American director and writer Ted Huffman, who will assume the position at New Year’s 2026, replaces Pierre Audi, who passed away suddenly this past May. Huffman, who has directed several productions at Aix, is known in particular for his collaborations with composer Philip Venables such as 4.48 Psychosis and Denis & Katya. - Opera Now
Several major curriculum publishers have withdrawn products from the market, while others have found that teachers are shying away from lessons that were once uncontroversial, on topics as basic as constitutional limits on executive power. - The New York Times
On any measure you care to look at, London’s economy — though still the most productive in Britain —is, at best, stagnant, and, at worst, in outright decline. - Washington Post
Whatever you order, it will come from a business that operates a bit differently than it once did: less like a restaurant and more like a pickup counter, the product on offer less like “an experience,” as the restaurateur Tom Colicchio told me earlier this year, and more like “a commodity.” - The Atlantic
“One of the most famous archaeological sites in the world, the tomb of the young Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun, is showing alarming signs of damage and is at risk of collapse if steps are not taken to save it, preservationists warn.” - Artnet
“Citing a chronic shortage of financial backing for independent publishers and nonprofits dedicated to writing and reading, a coalition of seven charitable foundations has established a Literary Arts Fund that will distribute a minimum of $50 million over the next five years.” - AP
Still Life with Guitar (1919) was supposed to be in a shipment of artworks from Madrid to Granada for an exhibition, but it didn’t arrive with the rest of the art. Did it proverbially “fall off the truck”? Spanish police say it may never have been on the truck. - Reuters
