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Australian Rock Art May Be 43,000 Years Old

Archaeologists using new measuring techniques have analyzed layers of a mineral glaze covering ancient figures in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, and the oldest layer appears to date back more than 40 millennia. - ABC (Australia)

If Edinburgh Is Overtouristed, Don’t Blame The Festivals, Blame UNESCO: City’s Ex-Culture Chief

"Lynne Halfpenny … insisted the Old Town and the Royal Mile had become overwhelmed with visitors and was seen as a 'bucket list' destination because of Edinburgh's UNESCO designation and not its 'festival city' status." - The Scotsman

Canada’s National Ballet Outside (And It’s So Much More Complicated Than That)

Given such limited capacity and the pent-up eagerness of ballet fans, all four performances were fully booked almost as soon as they were announced. - Toronto Star

Luis Alfaro’s Plan To Make LA A Theatre Dynamo

“A theater is best expressed by the work it initiates. I think it’s really important that we not just bring in the great work but that we make the great work. We haven’t even begun to express the city and its fullness.” - Los Angeles Times

Is Our Digital World Squeezing Out Our Ability To Wander?

The idea of the urban rambler—the flâneur—as a half-belonging creature took hold in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and adopted a variety of forms in the twentieth. - The New Yorker

Sotheby’s Hires A Gallery Wrangler. What Does This Signal About The Art World?

What’s changed is not that art fairs have been diminished but that the auction houses built broader sales and marketing platforms in the years leading up to the pandemic, which have turned out to be effective at serving a large new audience for art. - ARTnews

Why Charlie Watts Was The Engine Behind The Stones

Watts’s drumming was unique. He differed from his peers in the rock drumming pantheon, partly due to being a jazz aficionado, a sensibility that he took to the music of the Stones, and also through his self-contained manner. - The Conversation

Oops! Landmark Study On Honesty Used Fake Data

The data were collected by an insurance company, Dan Ariely says, but he no longer has records of interactions with it that could reveal where things went awry. “I wish I had a good story,” Ariely told Science. “And I just don’t.” - Science Magazine

Because Multiple Immersive Van Gogh Experiences Are Not Enough, Here Come The Immersive Monets

"Not one, not two, but three separate traveling immersive exhibitions based on the famed Impressionist's paintings are currently gearing up — and one could be headed to a city near you." - Artnet

The Fascinating New Science Exploring Consciousness

Consciousness has long been the preserve of philosophers and priests, poets and artists; now neuroscientists are investigating the mysterious quality and trying to answer the hard question of how consciousness arises in the first place. - The Guardian

Many People Don’t Realize That John Cage Wrote Some Quiet, Very Beautiful Music

Aficionados may love Suite for Toy Piano or Sonatas and Interludes, but mostly folks know only the conceptual piece 4'33" or raucous chance-based works like the one for electronics and household appliances (Variations VII) or Roaratorio (don’t even ask). Those folks should hear the Number Pieces. - The Guardian

AI Cloned Val Kilmer’s Voice So He Could Speak After Cancer Surgery

The generated voices have gotten more realistic in the age of deepfakes, a technology that uses AI to manipulate content to look and sound deceptively real. - Washington Post

Manufacturer Alan Heller, Dead At 81, Manufactured Plastic Housewares That Were Colorful And Even Witty

“Plastic in those days was ugly, and it was cheap. But Alan and (designers) the Vignellis had made something that was beautiful, and it could be abused. You could put it in the dishwasher. You could drop it. And it lasted forever." - The New York Times

That Naked Baby On The Cover Of A Nirvana Album 30 Years Ago? He’s Suing For Damages

He's now 30, and on Tuesday filed a lawsuit in a Los Angeles federal court against a host of defendants tied to the album, alleging the cover is “sexual exploitation” that will hurt him — emotionally and physically — for the rest of his life. - Washington Post

A New Tool To Try To Decode The Voynich Manuscript?

The 15th-century volume is written in a neat, careful script that bears little resemblance to any natural language, and no one has yet cracked its code. In a Q&A, Yale linguist Claire Bowern talks about approaching the task with computational statistics. - Knowable

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