With Australia reeling from the Delta strain, major festivals including Splendour and Bluesfest have been cancelled for the second year running, with an estimated 7,000 gigs and live events cancelled each week. - The Guardian
No longer will many nonprofit (or for-profit, for that matter) employees be cowed into the belief that 60-, 80-, 100-, or 168-hour weeks are acceptable business practices. - Alan Harrison
Dance competitions first emerged in the 1970s. Since then, they have spawned a distinctive, seductive subculture, mixing the hard-driving athleticism of organized sports with the presentational flair of performance art. - The New York Times
"A quarter of people think of it as a compliment, a quarter of people think it's an insult and the rest either don't know or have never even heard of the term." -BBC
"The GPT-3 system argued (in the article) that humans had nothing to fear from robots. Kwame Kwei-Armah, artistic director of the Young Vic, read it and felt inspired." A year later, GPT-3 is now co-author and co-star of the Young Vic's current show. - The Guardian
What remains is an uncertain future for both creators and OnlyFans, which has plans to go public later this year. The site has more than 130 million users and 2 million creators... - Wired
The Royal Society of London actually did attempt to start one in the winter of 1665, with a committee that included poets Abraham Cowley and John Dryden. Plague broke out in London that spring, everyone who could flee the capital did, and that was that. - Lapham's Quarterly
I can hide my mom’s photos or block her zombie Facebook account. But I’ve become accustomed to grieving this way. Technology has dictated what I remember and when, because I’ve let it. - Wired
Opposition leader Alexei Navalny says the prison he's in isn't like the old Soviet gulag, with inmates doing hard labor in subzero weather. Instead, part of what he calls "psychological torture" is being forced to sit and watch Putin-controlled news media and "propaganda films." - The Irish Times
“Giving people the reality — here’s the information, here’s a way to contextualize the moment we are in — you can’t build optimism unless you face the reality of the past, the reality of today.” - Washington Post
A large community has grown up around a now-outdated version of the online game RuneScape — and many players in rich countries don't want to slog through the tasks required to build their characters' skills or hoards of gold. - Slate
“It’s called ‘trailerizing’ a song. That means changing every aspect of the song but leaving the lyrics. People know the lyrics. The goal is to catch people’s attention." - Variety
The group, which for decades has been one of the world's most admired of its kind, said in a statement that it will close up shop in 2023, after what will have been 47 years. - Vulture
Spencer Elden claims that the band exploited him with what he now calls child pornography — but he's been exploiting that image of his infant self for some time. His actual grudge appears to be over an art show. - Artnet
The company's return to live performance, Verdi's Il trovatore, was to use sets from the Opéra de Monte-Carlo — but they're on a container ship stuck in the giant traffic jam at the Port of Los Angeles. But that won't stop L.A. Opera. - Los Angeles Times
