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School Book Bans Are A Losing Political Issue: Poll

A recent YouGov survey found that a majority of Republicans favors such restrictions, but Democrats and independents are very much against them. And when given a list of 15 potentially sensitive topics, none got a majority of independents or Democrats to agree that they should be banned from classrooms. - Insider

Warner Bros. Sues Paramount For $500 Million Dollars Over “South Park”

"Warner Bros. Discovery filed a lawsuit against Paramount Friday, claiming the rival media company breached its half-billion-dollar exclusivity contract with HBO Max by airing South Park on its own streaming platform, Paramount+." - CNN

“A Different-Shaped Company”: English National Opera CEO Outlines A Hoped-For Transformation

Stuart Murphy says that the plans currently taking shape in talks with Arts Council England call for large-scale proscenium opera remaining at the Coliseum in London but the majority of the company's work, and its headquarters, being outside the capital, featuring smaller-scaled works in different venues. - The Stage

Pittsburgh Symphony Is Starting A New Series of Casual Concerts

At the PSO Disrupt series, ... the concerts will last only about an hour and a half or less. A host will guide listeners through the music with remarks throughout the concert.  Even more radical might be the themed cocktails that attendees will be allowed to bring into the hall." - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Rise Of The Online “Event”

The word event was once reserved for more special occasions. But now Zoom is doing to the word event what Facebook did to the word friend; Just as most people you come across can instantly become a friend on Facebook, most gatherings that take place online can become an event. - Slate

US Plan To Raise Visa Fees For Artists To $1,615 Will Stop Most Artists From Coming To The US

The US immigration service wants to raise visa costs from $460 (£385) to $1,615 (£1,352) alongside other changes that artists and their managers say would make it almost impossible for anyone but the biggest stars to perform in the US. - The Guardian

How Linguistic Diversity Plays Out In English

Polyglot texts (texts using multiple languages) have become increasingly common; they are salvos fired against arrogant monolingualism. Monolingual English speakers would do best to join the multilingual world and welcome these texts. - The Conversation

Is It Time To Take The Metaverse Seriously?

It’s easy to imagine many productive uses of the metaverse, from educational to virtual meetings to entertainment. And most of these are already underway in some form or another. The consumer opportunities are clear: “Every year, US$54 billion is spent on virtual goods.” - 3 Quarks Daily

We’re All Afraid Of Losing Our Memory. But Remembering Everthing Can Be Debilitating

A ceaseless and faultless archive of mental images is instantly available; every configuration of clouds he has ever witnessed can be compared to the patterned endpapers of every book he has ever opened. But this prodigious memory proves useless, an obstruction to thought. - New York Review of Books

Canadian Actor Gordon Pinsent, 92

The Grand Falls, N.L., native and Canadian household name had a storied acting career spanning dozens of films and TV projects over six decades, including Due South, The Red Green Show, Babar and the Adventures of Badou, The Grand Seduction and The Shipping News. - CBC

When Dinosaur Encyclopedias Strode The World

From the 18th century to the 21st, the stats keep rising — number of words, number of entries, number of volumes — and the rival publications proliferate: Compton’s, Caxton’s, Collier’s, Grolier’s, the Oxford and the Columbia, to name a few. - Washington Post

Science Fiction Magazines Have Been Inundated With Chatbot-Generated Stories

The editors of three science fiction magazines — Clarkesworld, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Asimov’s Science Fiction — said this week that they had been flooded by submissions of works of fiction generated by A.I. chatbots. - The New York Times

AI Is One Thing, But AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) Takes It To The Next Level

Unlike existing, but newly popular, artificial intelligence (AI) systems which are designed to perform specific tasks such as image recognition, speech recognition, and natural language processing, artificial general intelligence (AGI) systems will be super-AI systems that will be able to learn anything. - Shelly Palmer

Big Sporting Events Are Showing Us The Future Of Our Dystopian Surveillance Society

Sports are a harbinger of a future of surveillance that is more intrusive, multitudinous, and expansive. But they aren’t just showing us the future. Sometimes, they’re directly bringing it about. - The Atlantic

How Did Jonathan Majors Get To Be In Every Movie, Everywhere, All At Once?

It all started when he was forced to take a theatre class after getting in trouble as a kid. - NPR

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