"(Zelia Nuttall) was the first to decode the Aztec calendar and identify the purposes of ancient adornments and weapons. She untangled the organization of commercial networks and transcribed ancient songs. … Having taught herself Nahuatl, she was the first to transcribe and translate ancient manuscripts." - Smithsonian Magazine
Using it to “poison” this training data could damage future iterations of image-generating AI models, such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, by rendering some of their outputs useless—dogs become cats, cars become cows, and so forth. - MIT Technology Review
"Edwaard Liang comes to Washington after spending the past decade as artistic director of BalletMet, an esteemed midsize company in Columbus, Ohio. He is credited with nearly doubling the organization’s budget and choreographing 21 works during his time there, which also saw an expansion of BalletMet’s school." - MSN (The Washington Post)
So began an antiques whodunit—whose cast of characters includes an Oxford-based priest-cum-archaeologist, a handful of rare-gem dealers and some of the British Museum’s most august researchers—that has shaken the premise behind the museum’s most important reason for existing. - The Wall Street Journal
The Indicator podcast from NPR's Planet Money features a tech exec-turned-Broadway producer who says that "the industry fully functions like venture capital. If you fail, it just goes (whooshing sound) to zero." The crucial difference is in how you scale up. (audio plus transcript) - NPR
"Over the years, Mr. Lutvak wrote several musicals that were staged in regional theaters and Off-Off-Broadway. But none were nearly as successful as A Gentleman’s Guide.' … The show opened in November 2013 and ran for 905 performances over more than two years," winning four Tony Awards. - The New York Times
Communications minister Shlomo Karhi pushed for the authority to unilaterally shut down the Qatar-based network's Israeli reporting operations (and, presumably, those, of other foreign outlets if he wishes), though he settled for doing so only with the approval of several Cabinet members and a court. - Columbia Journalism Review
The initiative by Opera America, described as a discount exchange for traveling audience members, has 85 participating companies across the US and Canada offering a 10% discount on tickets to subscribers of any other participating company. - Ludwig Van
"The stolen U-Haul truck contained 500 shadow puppets, props, costumes, projectors and other items used to stage puppet master Hamid Rahmanian’s Persian epic Song of the North, … leaving the production company empty-handed after four San Francisco shows." - MSN (San Francisco Chronicle)
"Police said the 11 ancient gold pieces were smuggled out of Ukraine in 2016 to be resold in Spain. The bracelets, necklaces and earrings, from the 8th to 4th Centuries BC, had forged documents saying they belonged to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church." - BBC
"92NY, one of the city’s leading cultural organizations, announced Monday that it was putting its prestigious literary reading series on pause, following an outcry over its decision to cancel an appearance last week by a prominent writer who had been critical of Israel." - The New York Times
The former Italian prime minister, who died in June, bought many of the paintings and sculptures from late-night telesales programmes. Managing the extensive collection is proving a headache for his descendants. - BBC
The problem with monuments and statues goes far beyond the issue of the legacies of slavery, important as that issue is. We need to learn to question all monuments rather than read them as factual documents of the past. - The Conversation
Some organizers said they were calling off the Palestinian-themed events because of security concerns. Others cited sensitivity, calling the cancellations and postponements understandable, if unfortunate, responses at a moment when emotions are raw. - The New York Times
