With eight years in development, Concord, “was a brand-new franchise that didn’t get much of a marketing push and drew the ire of ‘anti-woke’ snivelers who complained about the game’s use of pronouns on its character selection screen.” Four weeks after launch, Sony killed it. - Wired
Eddie Huang, who worked at Vice and has a new documentary out: Gavin McInnes's “voice and opinions are so entangled and at the foundation of Vice hese companies like Disney are investing in the ideas of a Nazi. You cannot separate the two.” - Los Angeles Times
“At 7 p.m., we encountered ... a dark message, accompanied by a QR code and a suggestion to visit the website TVPromise.com: 'Our contract with Disney, the owner of this channel, has expired. We appreciate your patience while we negotiate.’” - Slate
“It’s so interesting to think about the vast variety of things that can take place within one person’s life, and how nobody ever really knows it, because we only tell parts of our story to different people, and oh, I just want to know it so much!” - The Guardian (UK)
Jeanine Tesori: “If we did Grounded in theater, George and I would be going up to some room with questionable carpeting and just working and working over four weeks until we ran out of time. With the opera, we had done a workshop, but that’s not the real thing.” - The New York Times
For instance, “Outstanding Narrator: A refreshingly succinct category name for such a prestigious award. The winner this year will succeed the man who has won the past two years in a row, one Barack Obama.” - Vulture
Turns out that punting on the use of generative AI to “win” a contest of writing 50,000 words in a month, while having a sponsor that encourages the use of AI, while claiming those who question generative AI are “classist” and “ableist” isn’t going so well. - The New York Times
Pedro Almodóvar says in his 44 years of filmmaking, “We went from an atrocious dictatorship to the breadth of all the freedoms that were made available to us. … My career has been quite linked, curiously, to the opening up to democracy in Spain.” - Deadline
For one thing (guilty over here at AJ), "Do they spell it t-h-e-a-t-r-e instead of t-h-e-a-t-e-r? That’s a good one. Only a true theatre kid spells it ‘theatre.’ A ‘theater’ is where you watch ‘theatre.’ You see?” - American Theatre
October 7, a verbatim play along the lines of The Laramie Project and Anna Deavere Smith's works, is drawn from interviews with more than 20 survivors of the atrocities by Irish journalists Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney. - Los Angeles Times (MSN)
The current state of our knowledge on aesthetics, and specifically what we consider beautiful, is a mosaic of empirical discoveries. For over 150 years, psychologists have run carefully controlled experiments to determine whether an attribute, such as a particular colour, shape or melody is beautiful. - The Conversation
"It is well-known that classic works of Greek science and philosophy were translated into Arabic before they were translated into other European languages — including Latin. What is less well-known is that the point of translating foreign works was not to preserve them but to build on them." - Literary Hub
If faith in something as abstruse as literary theory seems absurd, consider a more familiar vehicle of human knowledge: the novel. As a form, “the novel” has the capacity to operate in two registers simultaneously, representing both the enormous breadth of the social world and the intricate minutiae of the individual life. - Public Books
Birmingham City Council owns an artwork collection valued at almost half a billion pounds, a BBC investigation has discovered. But none will be sold off to help tackle the financial challenges at the council which declared it was effectively bankrupt last year. - BBC
The West Kowloon Cultural District received a set amount of funding to open, expecting to sustain itself long-term by developing commercial and residential real estate on its property. But construction delays, and a market downturn have kept that plan from working, leaving WKCD desperate for cash. - Bloomberg (The Business Times, Singapore)
