Stories

As Indie Bookstore Day Gives Stores A Boost, They Talk About Battling Amazon

“There are about 70% more bookstores now than there were six years ago in the United States. After 20 years of declining numbers, they’re coming roaring back.” - Fast Company

You Might Have Associated Michael Tilson Thomas With San Francisco, But He Was Actually The Embodiment Of Los Angeles

Mark Swed: “MTT made music matter by making hope matter. He was, moreover, one of us. He achieved greatness though an epic amplification of a uniquely L.A. positivity in which grumpy became wistful.” - Los Angeles Times (Yahoo)

The Deep, Inescapable Unease Of The New Michael Jackson Biopic

And ‘unease’ is too kind a way to put it: “Everything left unsaid still lingers between the lines, sandwiched between the formidable melodies of his greatest hits, like toxic ooze leaking out from the middle of two slices of Wonderbread.” - Salon

But Opera Will Die If We Can’t Wrest It Back From Big Tech

“There is something in the embodied expression of a trained singer, on stage, in a room with other human beings, that no synthetic content can touch. But in an age when AI generates infinite aesthetic stuff at effectively zero cost, ‘irreplaceable’ needs to be made explicit.” - Opera America

The Death Of Opera Has Been Greatly Exaggerated

"Opera has had to adapt to survive, and the truth is it has done so successfully.” - New York Sun

The Deep, Strange Comfort Of A Rewatch

“Familiar things require less from us; they deliver the emotional payoff we expect. But repetition is also a way of revisiting earlier versions of ourselves.” - The Atlantic

News Publishers Are Trying To Prevent AI Scraping, But They’re Killing A Valuable History Service

Talk about the baby and the bathwater: "History needs stewards. The people of the Internet Archive do an outstanding job of preserving irreplaceable work and making it available to journalists and researchers.” - Nieman Lab

Think Shakespeare Isn’t For You?

Well, says the first Director’s Resident of Washington, D.C.’s huge Folger Shakespeare Library, you might need to look a little deeper. - NPR

no the english language is not like literally goin to pot as we watch lol

While these common gripes point to eccentric speech patterns, they don’t point to grammatical annihilation. English has weathered far worse. … English has lost almost all of the more complex linguistic trappings it was born with to become the language we know and — at least, sometimes — love today.” - The Conversation

I Am Anti-AI. How Do We Get It Out Of Schools?

At times, I find myself speaking with my kids about A.I. in the same terms that we might discuss a creepy neighbor who lives down the block: avoid eye contact, cross the street when you walk past his house, and, when in doubt, call on a trusted adult. - The New Yorker

Inside The First-Ever, Very Strictly Confidential, Choreographers’ Summit In New York

To allow for genuinely open, honest exchange, the rules at the Creators in Dance Summit, which hosted 75 choreographers across numerous genres, were simple but strict: “You cannot name individuals or institutions, and you can use what you received at the summit, but you cannot name who said it.” - Dance Magazine

The Ideas Challenging This Year’s Turner Prize Finalists

This year’s prize arrives at a moment when sculpture, funding structures and art education are becoming unusually entangled. - The Conversation

Blame It On The Culture

Someone observes a behavioral difference between groups or countries. They can’t immediately identify the mechanism. So, they invoke “culture” as an explanation or, even worse, “the culture.” The word lands with a satisfying thud that sounds like an explanation but isn’t one. It is the terminus of inquiry, not the beginning. - Laissez Faire

After Implosion Of The Adelaide Book Festival, A New Director

Both Newcastle and Adelaide made the decision to invite Abdel-Fattah but only one imploded over it. So what went differently for Rosemarie Milsom? - The Guardian

A Binational $1.3 Million Program To Fund Individual Creatives In San Diego And Tijuana

“At its core, Artists Count consists of a $1.3 million fund, available to active artists in both San Diego and Tijuana. In addition, a companion study will focus on communities with the least access to resources, examining ‘the realities, challenges, and economic impact of working artists’ on both sides of the border.” - SanDiegoRed

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