We’re living a new, much broader Deep Blue moment, when the basic boundary lines between the outer limits of what machines and humans can do are suddenly in flux. Only this time, the people directly concerned aren’t just a few dozen grandmasters in the rarified world of top-level chess. This time, it’s everyone. - Persuasion
This is twisted. A variety of cities and governmental departments "are using an art form once thought to carry humanity’s highest ideals to hide the system’s most vulnerable from view." - Boston Globe
"In one of the more extreme attempts to attract a younger audience post-Covid, the newly renovated museum in Amsterdam is launching a 'poor man’s Rembrandt project.'" - The Guardian (UK)
This isn't great for theatre: "The Tonys have long been a prestigious event for CBS, but the show itself is more important to Broadway producers, who rely on the exposure on the national network to market their productions." And they're struggling, post-COVID-19. - Los Angeles Times
Across the entire geographic and chronological recorded history of human societies, storytelling has enabled different ways of seeing and thinking to be communicated without being overtly threatening to dominant structures of power and belief. - LA Review of Books
"Based on Gogol's short story 'The Terrible Revenge,' the opera (by composer Yevhen Stankovych) was directed by Andreas Weirich. ... 'We did some of the rehearsals in the bomb shelter,' he said. 'At times there were four air raid sirens a day – it became a new normal.'" - The Guardian
What led to Nataki Garrett’s resignation after just four years in the post, in which she spent as much or more time handling crises and fielding criticism as programming and making theatre? And what led OSF to the point where they had to put out their hand for help? - American Theatre
In just over two years, the school acquired Opus 3 Artists, Pentatone Records, and the major London agency Askonas Holt. SFCM president David Stull explains to Jeffrey Arlo Brown what the school's up to, and Brown considers for whom all this is, and is not, a good deal. - Van
“There is a massive shift there in terms of interests, what millennials consider relevant and find exciting. It will impact more than just what we put onstage. It will impact the entire economy of the performing arts. And how does that generation feel about philanthropy? - San Francisco Classical Voice
Her country's first female architect, Lari, now 82, gave up a career building high-profile landmarks to design simple, inexpensive structures of bamboo and mud that impoverished villagers and displaced people can build themselves for a fraction of what a prefab concrete shelter costs. - CNN
To show you what this process looks like, we trained six tiny language models starting from scratch. We’ve picked one trained on the complete works of Jane Austen, but you can choose a different path. - The New York Times
Most people who write for the internet have had the experience of publishing something that escapes the bounds of one’s usual audience and goes viral. The experience can be mesmerizing. - Slate
Rex Brasher, who left "almost 900 large-scale watercolors documenting American bird life and habitat," was not a self-promoter. He preferred to learn from birds in the wild "by boat, bicycle, canoe and on foot," rather than kill them, as Audubon did. - Washington Post
And that how is together. "The very idea of collectively tuning in to history as it happens has been altered, as the profusion of channels and platforms now funnels audience members into self-segregated affinity groups." - Nieman Lab
"It's a delicate experiment in what happens when we really try and tune in to local audiences rather than just deliver the same product around the country, which is what we normally do." - BBC
It's always the libraries. "Three national and state libraries, including the National Scientific Medical Library of Ukraine, as well as some 25 university libraries, have been severely damaged or destroyed, the most shocking statistics relate to public libraries."- The Atlantic
"For centuries, skilled Iranian storytellers known as Naqqals have transfixed audiences in traditional coffeehouses" - but it was always an art by men, and for men only. Gordafarid "is the first known female Naqqal to have learned the craft the traditional way." - Los Angeles Times
It was not exactly easy, but Brian Maracle "has figured out this improbable, but linguistically extremely smart, method of delivering this radically different language to adults." - The New York Times
"The dimly lit space, which is sandwiched between a former Victorian public baths and a burger shop in Clapton, east London, is a cinematic Aladdin’s cave, its floor reduced to a narrow path between stacks and shelves of film paraphernalia." - The Guardian (UK)
