She and her late husband donated many millions to humanities endeavors in greater Washington — notably to the National Gallery of Art, George Washington University, and the University of Maryland, where she gave $15 million for the performing arts center popularly called "The Clarice". - MSN (The Washington Post)
Will deep learning eventually become “artificial general intelligence” (AGI), matching human intelligence in every way? I don’t believe it will happen in the next 20 years. - Wired
Kevin Scally, chief relationship officer at Charity Navigator, the world’s largest nonprofit evaluator, says MrBeast is part of an encouraging trend of social media influencers using their power to fight homelessness or raising COVID-19 relief funds. - Toronto Star
Platforms like Google and Facebook have transformed the way we consume and share news, but the digital revolution hasn’t yet revealed an equivalent breakthrough in the way the media makes money. This is a paradoxical reality at a time of unprecedented innovation. - The Walrus
In March, Bob Dylan sold his catalog to Universal Music for a reported $300 million. Earlier this week, Primary Wave purchased James Brown’s music assets for $90 million. - Los Angeles Times
A controversial painting was stolen from the Catholic University of America campus last month. When it was replaced by a smaller copy of the same image, that painting was also stolen. - InsideHigherEd
While digital transformation was creating abundance in the scarce resources that had previously defined market power, it was also creating a new scarce resource, and therefore a new source of competitive advantage: customer attention. - Harvard Business Review
"In this milieu, a Cold War culture dedicated to conformity and shot through with Freudian panic about emasculation, audiences could glimpse Anybodys, a character who refuses to conform, refuses the ironclad terms of gender, in bold ways." So Tony Kushner and Stephen Sondheim went for it. - Slate
People don’t have proper names; they are marked by a combination of letters and numbers, like the inmates of Nazi camps. They wear identical clothes, their hair is uniformly shorn, their food is synthetic and purely utilitarian, and their homes are identical and transparent. - The New Yorker
"The Met is the first major performing arts organization in the city to announce a booster-shot mandate that will apply to audiences as well as staff members; the new rule will take effect Jan. 17." - The New York Times
Today, the media industry has consolidated under fewer owners than ever before; its labour conditions have grown dire. The undeniable expertise of many journalists isn’t enough to restore public credibility in the press. The political problem will require a political, not merely a technical, fix. - Psyche
"Songs of Disappearance is surpassing the likes of Abba and The Weeknd - not to mention Christmas favourites Michael Bublé and Mariah Carey. Created by BirdLife Australia, the album features the birdsongs of 53 of Australia's most threatened species." - BBC
“We can perform this music in the concert hall, we can talk about this music. But until people are just hearing it on an everyday, run-of-the-mill, hearing-it-in-your-car basis, nothing really shifts.” - DCMetro Theatre Arts
" new social media personalities … paint cheery portraits of life as foreigners in China — and also hit back at criticisms of Beijing's authoritarian governance, its policies toward ethnic minorities and its handling of the coronavirus." - The New York Times
Kelley Hashemi’s day job is as an aeronautical engineer at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, where she leads a research team working to integrate automation into the national airspace. She's also a principal dancer with the Peninsula Ballet Theatre. - San Francisco Chronicle
