“Life and Trust, an immersive follow up to Sleep No More from the producing team Emursive, closed abruptly on April 19 after beginning performances in the summer of 2024. … No official reasoning was provided for the show’s sudden closure … after tickets were mysteriously refunded over the weekend.” - TheaterMania
“This month, Virginia Opera and Richmond Symphony will present the world premiere of composer Damien Geter and librettist Jessica Murphy Moo’s Loving v. Virginia, an operatic retelling of the events leading to the landmark 1967 Supreme Court decision that declared laws against interracial marriage unconstitutional.” - The Washington Post (MSN)
“(He was) known for his thick applications of paint and his furious brushstrokes … (and) an uncompromising personality; (his) paintings depicted scenes like Noah’s Ark breaking apart in a storm and a huge candy-cane-colored funnel cloud looming over a rural landscape.” - The New York Times
“Lindsey Halligan, 35, is a Trump attorney who seems to have tasked herself as a sort of commissioner — or expurgator, according to critics — of a premier cultural institution.” In fact, the executive order appears to have been her idea. - The Washington Post (MSN)
Four Democratic members of the House committee overseeing the institution wrote, “we now stand at the brink of seeing the Smithsonian at its worst: shaped solely by the views and ideology of one individual.” Trump’s executive order about the Smithsonian gives Vance the power to decide what material should be removed. - ARTnews
“Two former dancers … filed a lawsuit on Thursday accusing the group of amassing a financial fortune and worldwide renown by subjecting an ‘army of child laborers’ to brutal working conditions and psychological coercion.” Another former company member filed a similar suit last November. - The New York Times
The stakes are high. WrestleMania, which began in 1985, is being treated as a litmus test - not just for WWE's global expansion, but for Netflix's potential move into live sports. - BBC
Hobby inflation, understood in this light, is about much more than price hikes: It’s about the shrinking and possible disappearance of opportunities for people from different backgrounds to get to know one another. - The Atlantic
Over the past half century the art history industry has produced reams of interpretation, incorporating no shortage of words by Serra himself. The author of work so totally laconic has set the terms of its understanding as if the death of the author bypassed him entirely. - N + One
I think Hollywood used to propose itself as a place where artists and creative people could sustain themselves, perhaps even strike it rich, and that’s gone. The loss of that idea is … incalculable. - Los Angeles Times
By thinking of language as a mathematical category, Tai-Danae Bradley's been able to apply established tools to study it and glean new insights. Linguists hope her model can help them to prove certain theories about how grammar and meaning emerge from strings of words, and to identify how AI-generated text differs from human language. - Quanta
As the English degree craters, and the idea of the university itself is under assault in the United States and elsewhere, those of us who remain interested in literate culture are sensing in its decline some correlation with the current apoplexy, if not direct causation. - 3 Quarks Daily
Conservatives have painted D.E.I. as a uniform set of programs, ideas, and ideologies. In reality, the term encompasses a wide-ranging set of practices. Still, D.E.I. spaces often share certain analytic frameworks, usually centering on questions of justice. - The New Yorker
Meta cited an expert witness who downplayed the books' individual importance, averring that a single book adjusted its LLM's performance "by less than 0.06 percent on industry standard benchmarks, a meaningless change no different from noise." Thus there's no market in paying authors to use their copyrighted works, Meta says. - Futurism
“Directors owning their own movies is the opposite of business as usual — and to studios, cause for freaking out. According to senior executives at rival studios, the Sinners deal sets a ‘very dangerous’ precedent.” - Vulture
