"(The venue) has told the Philly Pops that unless it immediately comes up with rent from its just-finished holiday run, as well as advance payments for upcoming concerts in February, the Pops will have to vacate the Kimmel and will no longer be allowed to perform there." - The Philadelphia Inquirer
"Actor Alec Baldwin, who fatally shot a cinematographer on the set of the Western movie Rust in 2021, and the film's armorer, Hannah Gutierrez Reed, will each be charged with two counts of involuntary manslaughter, prosecutors said Thursday." - CNN
"Equity is calling for a pay increase of 17% in year one, and a further 10% in year two. Other demands include a five-day rehearsal week as opposed to the current six days, and an increase in holiday entitlement from 28 days to 34." Any walkout would happen around Easter. - BBC
In another win for workplace dignity, one of the nation’s highest courts recently suggested that businesses cannot force their employees to participate in office parties and other supposedly enjoyable activities. - The New Yorker
While there will always be a need for essays and written assignments – especially in the humanities, where they are essential to help students develop a critical voice – do we really need all students to be writing the same essays and responding to the same questions? - The Conversation
For Herbert Read, “culture” is capitalism’s breaking apart of life and art, and the subsequent fencing off of the poet, the architect, and the painter into separate institutions, giving politicians titles such as Minister for Culture, and making artists subservient not to the “natural” forms of life but the will of political power. - Jacobin
A makerspace in a small central New York village; a network of food pantries in Canada; recording studios with instruments in the Netherlands; resources carried to remote tribes in Kenya on the backs of camels. These are all libraries, all radically different, but all bound by a common mission. - Publishers Weekly
In what would be a first, one of the bills also offers an opportunity to legally acknowledge crimes committed against Jews during World War 2 by the French state, according to a French senator involved in drafting the bills. - Artnet
"It turns out the bots are no better at journalism — and perhaps worse — than their would-be human masters. On Tuesday, CNET began appending lengthy correction notices to some of its AI-generated articles after Futurism, another tech site, called out the stories for containing some 'very dumb errors.'" - MSN (The Washington Post)
What if alcohol was not merely a vice, but one of the triggers that sparked the dawn of human civilization — in essence, the very thing that shifted us from hunter-gatherers to agrarians? - Salon
"He agreed with his fellow writer Bruce Chatwin, who famously turned down the Thomas Cook Award, that the term was too limiting. … When asked why, unlike Chatwin, he accepted the Cook Award twice, he said: 'I was hungry for prizes.'" - The Guardian
The instinct to treat Muslims like toddlers, incapable of dealing with unwelcome developments, and therefore in need of protection at all times, is powerful in some quarters. The same patronizing attitude is rarely applied to Christians or Jews or atheists. - The Atlantic
Six productions — including A Strange Loop, Topdog/Underdog, and Death of a Salesman — closed last weekend, having struggled at the box office despite good reviews. Yet all saw ticket sales rise in their final week, and a few had the highest grosses of their runs. - Broadway News
A team of researchers led by Pablo Villalobos at Epoch AI recently predicted that programs such as the eerily impressive ChatGPT will run out of high-quality reading material by 2027. Without new text to train on, AI’s recent hot streak could come to a premature end. - The Atlantic
While most US opera companies have returned to performing live and pulled back from the streaming video they offered at the height of COVID, a few — notably Experiments in Opera, Boston Lyric Opera, and Opera Philadelphia — have continued, even trying operatic series with showrunners and writers' rooms. - San Francisco Classical Voice
