Baritone Peter Braithwaite: "These folk traditions are really strong; they’re about resistance and they’re about remembrance of former freedoms, but they’re also about laying something down that can be passed on to future generations." - The Guardian (UK)
I decided to try a combination of tools to see if the AI-assisted work product would outperform my purely original work. Unsurprisingly, the work done in partnership with my AI-coworker outperformed work I did alone. - Shelly Palmer
The current generation of students has moved on from writing. Literally. Most students fail to see the relevance of writing in a world—their world—that is largely post-literate. They are at home in media not yet born when I began teaching, media that privilege images and sounds over written text. This does not spell the end of the world, but it does spell “tbh, dwbi.” - American Scholar
The arts presenter removed the Philly Pops as a resident company, "shutting the group out of Verizon Hall and removing customers’ ability to buy Pops tickets from its website." - Philadelphia Inquirer
Since 1938, the Harvard Study of Adult Development has been investigating what makes people flourish. After starting with 724 participants the study incorporated the spouses of the original men and, more recently, more than 1,300 descendants of the initial group. - The Atlantic
Noisenights are run via a crowdfunding model—events are announced, artists and venues secured, and when audience members buy tickets, they are helping to create a fully-funded event. Each of the 17 noisenights so far has sold out. - Van
Smart Questions are, typically, kind of dumb. And, just as typical, questions that might initially seem dumb or underinformed, or downright unintelligent, are the smartest way to learn stuff if you’re a journalist, an academic, or anybody else. - The Atlantic
Those voters can never quite decide how much heed to pay to a movie’s popularity or accessibility. That’s how you wind up with absurd best picture races like the one in 2010 between “The Hurt Locker” and “Avatar.” (“The Hurt Locker” won.) - The New York Times
"For many in the indie film world, the drama surrounding Jihad Rehab (now titled The UnRedacted) marks a new status quo. ... (There's) a new, unspoken modus operandi in which festivals — once the bastion of provocative, button-pushing fare — are desperate to avoid controversy and the wrath of any identity-focused Twitter mob." - Variety
"He is mathematical like Balanchine, but there's more of a lightness, an everyday quality that feels playful, even when the steps are technically arduous. … In honor of this peak Peck moment, we asked Peck and his collaborators to decode his artistic tics." - New York Magazine
"(The venue) has told the Philly Pops that unless it immediately comes up with rent from its just-finished holiday run, as well as advance payments for upcoming concerts in February, the Pops will have to vacate the Kimmel and will no longer be allowed to perform there." - The Philadelphia Inquirer
In another win for workplace dignity, one of the nation’s highest courts recently suggested that businesses cannot force their employees to participate in office parties and other supposedly enjoyable activities. - The New Yorker
By the first decades of the twentieth century, national organizations had established standards for the credentialling of lawyers, doctors, and nurses. The professionalization of criticism was a less coherent affair, because criticism did not belong to a single trade or discipline. - The New Yorker
Natalie Murray Beale says, "We looked a lot at the physical aspects, ensuring she would not be too reverent of the conductor’s podium, because after all it’s just her workplace." - The Observer (UK)
Bad news for writers and artists: As AI improves, the plagiarism will become less apparent. "There’s no quick technological fix to these issues. As has been the case for nearly all instances of bad information spreading online, readers and editors will again have to figure this out themselves." - Slate
The experience had clued him in to something: In elite circles, not all opportunities were advertised. There were rooms that the rest of us didn’t know existed, and those rooms came with possibilities never advertised by the career-services office. - The Atlantic
Across broad landscapes of science and technology, the past is eating the present, progress is plunging, and truly disruptive work is hard to come by. Despite an enormous increase in scientists and papers since the middle of the 20th century, the number of highly disruptive studies each year hasn’t increased. - The Atlantic
Observing the company's worrisome slump in ticket sales and Peter Gelb's announced plans to focus more on contemporary works and reduce the number of performances (especially of revivals), Parterre Box contributor Dawn Fatale suggests further ways to get the FOMO factor working in the Met's favor again. - Parterre Box
Once it learns a specific voice, VALL-E can synthesize audio of that person saying anything—and do it in a way that attempts to preserve the speaker's emotional tone. - Ars Technica
Data from millions of manuscripts show that, compared with the mid-twentieth century, research done in the 2000s was much more likely to incrementally push science forward than to veer off in a new direction and render previous work obsolete. Analysis of patents from 1976 to 2010 showed the same trend. - Nature
