The news that a team of students, using AI on digital scans, has deciphered the text on one of the scrolls carbonized in the 79 AD eruption of Vesuvius was greeted with excitement in many places — but not among the current residents of the site. - Artnet
"Most linguists think those speakers were nomadic herders on the steppes of Ukraine and Russia about 6,000 years ago. Yet a minority put the origin 2,000 to 3,000 years earlier, (in agricultural) Anatolia. ... Now a new analysis, using techniques borrowed from evolutionary biology, has come down in favor of the latter." - Knowable
"The Dallas-based foundation honoring the group updated its name ... to recognize their contributions, highlighted their work in a new exhibit ..., and is set to publish for the first time in English a memoir in which one of the women describes spying on the Nazis while working at a Paris museum." - AP
The work in question, sold for roughly $1 million early this week, is Ivan Aivazovsky's painting Moonlit Night. Ukraine's prosecutor-general tweeted that the item had been looted from the Mariupol Museum of Local Lore. The auction house claims that it sold a different Aivazovsky work with the same title. - Artnet
"Dallas residents will vote on a $1.25 billion bond package in May, which includes one of the largest allocations for cultural facilities in decades. The Dallas City Council allocated $75.2 million of the package last Wednesday for cultural facilities or a little over 6% of the package." - KERA (Dallas)
"(The company) will present 18 productions in 2024-25, matching the current season and pandemic-curtailed 2019-20 for the fewest since 14 in strike-shortened 1980-81." There's only one completely new production (Michael Mayer directing Aïda), plus five which are new-to-the-Met, four of those being contemporary works. - AP
According to Ford’s internal data gathered from some of its newer vehicles, less than 5 percent of all in-car listening is to AM radio. Which is perhaps why Ford decided last year to drop AM from all of its vehicles, not just EVs. - The Atlantic
On top of fewer shows and virtually no pilots, the available acting gigs pay less than they used to amid rising cost of living, talent sources say. - Deadline
Ms. Blouin plowed resources into an art news site, ArtInfo, staffing it with young journalists. She also moved into philanthropy with the founding of the Louise T. Blouin Foundation, an international nonprofit organization. - The New York Times
"I am frustrated by how often repatriation activists have to reinvent the wheel, which is another reason that I think social media has been so important."Â - ARTnews
What if I showed up as a human experimenting with classical music? Would that make classical music more human? This was a long time ago, but now everybody does it, so I guess it works. - San Francisco Classical Voice
The controversy is over nominations for the 2023 awards: the ceremony was held for the first time in China, in Chengdu. Memos leaked afterward show that, in an act of anticipatory censorship, several titles with enough votes to be finalists were declared ineligible out of fear of offending China's government. - Salon
Antilogic was a form of contradiction that caused a person to simultaneously believe opposite things about a single event or phenomenon, without any way out or means of resolving the contradictory views in which they had become ensnared. - Psyche
"A Danish man has gone on trial in the city of Aarhus over accusations that he fraudulently made 4.38m kroner (more than $635,000) in royalties on music-streaming sites. ... Prosecutors allege … the huge numbers of streams required to generate that amount of money could not have (come from) genuine users." - The Guardian
The density of late-season openings — 11 plays and musicals over a nine-day stretch in late April — has producers and investors worried about how those shows will find enough ticket buyers to survive. - The New York Times
