“The report shows 44% of freelancers earn less than the UK National Living Wage, up from 34% last year. ... The survey reveals high levels of unpaid work, rising expenses and falling incomes, with 32% of respondents saying over half of their working hours are unpaid and 75% reporting higher work-related costs.” - WhatsOnStage (UK)
“The Joffrey’s current lease was slated to end following the 2027 season, but this extension will keep the city’s top ballet company at the massive downtown opera house through 2034. Joffrey first began performing under Lyric’s roof in October 2021, after a delay caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.” - WBEZ (Chicago)
Her tribe, birthplace, date of death — all those and much else from the journals and later testimony of Lewis and Clark had been considered definitive. But Native American oral history about Sacagawea is quite different, and there are good reasons to believe that Lewis and Clark were misinformed. - The New York Times Magazine
“The displays were flagged for review in accordance with a Trump administration order directing National Park Service staff to identify language and historical depictions that ‘inappropriately disparage Americans past or living’.” - The Philadelphia Inquirer (MSN)
“Patrick Soon-Shiong will retain majority ownership of the Los Angeles Times in his planned public sale, which will be limited to $75 million after the paper is combined with some of his other media ventures.” - TheWrap
Due to the Trump/Congress clawback of funding for public broadcasting, the 13 GBH employees who work on the history documentary series have lost their jobs and production of new episodes is paused indefinitely. Reruns of American Experience documentaries from previous seasons will be broadcast instead. - Current
Geophysicists say Istanbul has a 40-60% chance of a major earthquake by 2055. … There are roughly 40,000 historical sites in Istanbul that need to be protected from earthquakes. … The Washington Post studied three examples from minimal to maximum intervention: Hagia Sophia, the Basilica Cistern, and Zeyrek Çinili Hamam. - The Washington Post (MSN)
Swift is increasingly taken seriously in the halls of academia. A number of universities offer courses dedicated to Swift, but typically not to her music as such: rather, many of these courses take a literary approach to her songs or a broadly sociological approach to her as a pop culture phenomenon. - The Conversation
The low representational numbers for women are difficult to square. By various measures (including the numbers of women graduating from degree programs in the arts), roughly two-thirds of the field’s writers are women—there is not, as artistic directors once argued, a pipeline issue. - The New Yorker
“Among them are hundreds of music and lyric sketches of Sondheim’s well-known works as well as drafts of songs that were cut from shows or never made it to a production’s first rehearsal. Dozens of scrapbooks hold theatre programmes, clippings and opening night telegrams.” - The Guardian
No one knows exactly how the system obtains its matches. There is an entire field in AI known as “mechanistic interpretability” that is attempting to understand how LLMs move from a given input (your passport photo) to a given output (identifying your face in the Facebook post). - Harper's
The plan addresses national policy, library legislation, and local connections. “While libraries serve as a cornerstone of democracy the world over, we operate within the circumstances we’re provided,” they said. “We grow and ebb and flow with the communities we serve. - Publishers Weekly
“As more companies explore AI literary translation, the rapid progression of the technology and what that could mean for the future has divided the book industry.” - The Bookseller (UK)
The problem with a competitive approach to puzzles is that you take what is intended as a soothing and distracting pastime and quietly hitch it to a goal and a ticking clock. - The American Scholar
Prolific writers are simultaneously envied and dismissed, admired and snarked about. There is the sense that a writer can write too much, that whatever results can’t be very good.
