"Chatter that Amazon (and other tech giants) have been sniffing around MGM has circulated for some time. But sources indicated that Amazon's interest in acquiring the studio has taken on a new tenor beyond the usual rumor mill." - Variety
"Under the terms of the deal, AT&T will spin off entertainment arm WarnerMedia and combine it with Discovery, creating a TV, film and streaming powerhouse. AT&T's WarnerMedia owns the likes of the Warner Bros. studio, HBO and streaming service HBO Max, as well as the Turner cable networks, including CNN, TNT and TBS. Discovery's reality TV-heavy properties include Discovery...
The first scheduled event is the finale of this year's Tribeca Film Festival on June 19. Only vaccinated people will be admitted. And how will management ensure that patrons are telling the truth about their shots? Said CEO James Dolan, "That's a really good question, I have no idea." - The New York Times
"The challenge is a conversation starter and design exercise. It’s also a needed counter to commercial real estate developers, whose ideas of density tend to be based on a single principle — how many dollars they can squeeze out of every square foot — with little regard for green space or other community needs. (Case in point: those sad,...
"When you aggregate hundreds of predictions, the result is a special, concentrated kind of wrong. Everyone was trying their best, and everyone missed. And these 40-year-old predictions don’t seem wrong in the fun, steampunk way that, say, late Victorian predictions of personal blimps or hot-air-ballooning robots might seem wrong. They’re just saggy middle-aged predictions." - Wired
You can imagine my astonishment when, early one morning, my calculations revealed that within Les Miserables, the principal characters of Fantine, Eponine, Gavrosche and Valjean all died on or very close to a golden ratio point. Further analysis revealed that major changes in the story line (matching to within less than 1%) coincided with all 16 golden ratio points....
Its history is peppered with financial crises and near-death experiences. Perhaps it was placed on earth to make “righteousness readable” (in the centenary words of Lord Robert Cecil), but the paper has nearly always struggled to make it remunerative. - New York Review of Books
“You don’t feel part of a crowd,” said Michael Howell, a season ticket holder for 40 years. “It’s more like a movie theatre where you’re all watching the same event. But you don’t feel a common purpose like you do when a sports crowd is really excited.” - WBGH
The goal is to form a wall-to-wall union representing workers in nearly every aspect of museum operations. “We’ve got conservators, we’ve got people working in security who are on the floor, we’ve got frontline workers, educators, administrative staff,” says Elizabeth Norman, an Assistant Manager of Gallery Experience in the visitor experience department, one of the organizers. “There’s just a...
Chinese archaeology has a very different history from Egyptian archaeology. It has largely been done by local, Chinese archaeologists, for one thing; it was not an imperialist project. And it was also tied, early on, to nationalist claims of identity. - Washington Post
"The association has long been considered corrupt by critics and other members of the press, but that’s not what people are really mad about. The HFPA now faces the most serious crisis in its 77-year history because a bunch of separate Hollywood factions led by a lightning brigade of entertainment publicists finally decided to call out the organization they’ve...
"Dialing for dollars may be a skill that some sellers of products and services profitably employ. But when it comes to deepening a level of patron loyalty that would get a major cultural institution out of a pandemically induced shutdown, it’s done more harm than good." - David Rohde
After wresting control of IMG Artists in an internal power struggle, Russian-born tycoon Alexander Shustorovich has kept the agency alive through the pandemic to become the world’s largest manager of classical music talent. - Billboard
Christopher Marinello spends his life tracking stolen masterpieces. "I get a huge amount of tips, usually on WhatsApp. ... Sometimes they are from informants I work with, but I have to sift through a lot of garbage. I once had a guy tell me the original Mona Lisa in the Louvre was a fake, and that he had the...
"Spinning continuously at a speed of 60 revolutions per minute, or once per second, the drum measured 7 inches in diameter, and 11 inches in length. Its surface was etched with 5,400 Chinese characters, letters of the English alphabet, punctuation marks, numerals, and a handful of other symbols. How was the typist in the film able to pull off such a...
