The internet is worth fighting for because despite all the misery, there’s still so much good to be found there. And yet, fixing online discourse is the definition of a hard problem. But look. Don’t worry. I have an idea. - MIT Technology Review
"'That really pushed us to the edge,' says Maggie Quick, a guest attendant. 'It was just the constant understaffing and the emotional exhaustion.'" Union recognition has gone smoothly enough at some indie cinemas; Alamo Drafthouse, however, is another matter. - AP
The author of The God of Small Things gave a speech about Kashmir and the Indian government's counterinsurgency campaign there at a conference in Delhi in 2010. She's now "accused of making statements promoting social enmity, prejudicing national integration and inciting offences against the state and public tranquillity." - The Conversation
Dariush Mehrjui, 83, one of the founders of Iran's "new wave," and his wife/co-screenwriter/costume designer, Vahideh Mohammadifar, were discovered by their daughter with knife wounds in their necks. - AP
A plaster version of The Burghers of Calais, now thought to be worth £3 million, is one of 1,750 works owned by the museums of the city of Glasgow and now described as "unlocated." The sculpture was last on display in 1949, when it was damaged. - The Guardian (AFP)
Contract negotiations drag on. Players say they want salaries that can attract top talent. Management says it wants to pay better but the cash just isn't there. And with the orchestra having merged with the Kimmel Center in 2021, a strike could upend the city's entire arts ecosystem. - MSN (The Philadelphia Inquirer)
Both venues were evacuated on Saturday after the threats came in. Heightened security will remain in place at least through the opening of Paris+ (an Art Basel fair) on Thursday. - Artnet
"In an internal memo, … the group’s founder and artistic director, Brad Clark, has announced he will end the operations of Maryland Lyric Opera, effective immediately. Clark, the son of billionaire construction mogul A. James Clark, founded Maryland Lyric Opera in 2014." - Washington Classical Review
Men accounted for 95 percent of the conducting credits at the 11 largest American opera companies between 2005 and 2021. But men also dominated other major roles in opera: they accounted for 85 percent of directoring credits, 88 percent of set-designer credits, 85 percent of lighting-designer credits and 59 percent of costume-designer credits. - The New York Times
As smartphones go, this integration of AI signals a new era, one created with tech that is intuitive to the kind of ferocious simulation the next generation is being engineered around, where a picture is no longer worth a thousand words but a thousand tiny fictions. - Wired
Maybe the nightmare about AI isn’t that it will go rogue and threaten our existence with lethal viruses. Maybe the likely endgame is similar to the enchanted broom—more mundane but no less messy: humanity flooded with bullshit. - The Walrus
It’s the age-old problem of the relationship between the good and the popular. Plato saw the popular as the enemy of the good, but then he is at one end of the scale, famously arguing that democracy was bad because it confused the good with the popular. - 3 Quarks Daily
"When I'm in my practice sessions with my breakdance crew, sometimes I put some classical instrumental music and I invite them to actually explore that because music dictates movement. - NPR
“We’re the first to see our downtown as impacted as it is, because when we said ‘Work from home,’ everyone just grabbed a laptop, and boom!” That reliance on tech made downtown especially vulnerable. - The New Yorker
Bound together as parasite/host, neither people nor technologies can exist apart from the other because they are constitutive prostheses of each other. Such an interrelation is not unique to human beings. - Noema
