“All of TikTok’s potential suitors would be facing an uphill battle to close a deal. The first challenge will be raising enough money. Only a small number of the world’s largest companies likely have enough cash on hand,” and then there’s the fact that ByteDance isn’t interested in selling. - Wired

Stereotypes come about when we stop looking. Why we stop looking is something we all need to discern for ourselves. When we stop looking, we erase the particularness of how humans present themselves physically and vocally. It does not take long to make a judgment. - Washington Post

"In any industry what matters is not what you’re making, but how many followers you have. Do you want to do something, do you want to make an album, put out a book? Okay, but who is your audience? That’s pretty bad, it severely limits who enters the cultural industry." - El Pais

The new work, which uses games to improve AI, stands in contrast to past approaches, which measured an AI program’s success via its mastery of games. - Quanta

"It feels like another sign that A.I. is not even close to living up to its hype. In my eyes, it’s looking less like an all-powerful being and more like a bad intern whose work is so unreliable that it’s often easier to do the task yourself." - The New York Times

Thinking of memory as an adaptive trait has a less obvious and perhaps more interesting corollary: “Viewed through this lens, it is apparent that what we often see as the flaws of memory are also its features.” - The New Yorker

The UNC system and the School of the Arts will pay 65 alumni a total of about $12.5 million for abuses that lasted “during most of the school’s history.” - Raleigh News & Observer (Yahoo)

The researcher wrote, "Over the past years, safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products.” - The Verge

Here's an explanation of the origins of the arts branch of the Games, a timeline history, and a preview of some of what will be seen in Paris through this summer. - Euronews

A brochure issued in July 2021 on the OCI website says that if the status is cancelled for any of the reasons stated, the person would also be blacklisted, preventing their entry into India. The brochure does not make any mention of an appeal. - The Walrus

While there have been brief bursts of attention to the issue before, France had been notably resistant to the movement. In 2018, Catherine Deneuve and others published an open letter in Le Monde arguing that #MeToo was going too far. Now actress Judith Godrèche has given the issue new momentum. - AP

The performances that work best for both haptic tours and live audio descriptions are dance and theater productions that offer a mix of visual and auditory elements. - San Francisco Classical Voice

The public nature of Xue’s allegations has shaken the classical music world in China. And while these allegations are unproven, they highlight structural issues that make abuse of power and corruption common at Chinese conservatories. - Van

A small cottage industry of DJs, musicians and producers have been twiddling with TTPD since its release last month, and adding their own twists. - Washington Post

While it's too late to restore the first of the string quartet's scheduled performances there, the second, for Saturday night, was reinstated with additional security measures and an earlier starting time. The venue's stated concern was over property destruction during Gaza-related demonstrations at a nearby university. - The Strad

"Across cultures, (an international team of 75) researchers found, songs share certain features not found in speech, suggesting that Darwin might have been right: Despite its diversity today, music might have evolved in our distant ancestors." - The New York Times

The Canadian-born soprano/conductor will begin, as of August 2026, a three-year term as chief conductor and artistic director of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra. She remains principal guest conductor of the Gothenburg Symphony in Sweden and takes the same position at Switzerland's Orchestre de chambre de Lausanne this summer. - Ludwig Van

Do you consider yourself more of a music person or a lyrics person, and why? - Dirt

From “ecstatic reminders” to paparazzi shots that became court cases, these photos altered the world’s conception of at least some of their subjects’ lives. - The Guardian (UK)

"The kind of people who deign to sit for portraits think of themselves, to quote a Shakespearean sonnet, as ‘lords and owners of their faces,’ and they tend be riled if they don’t see their self-image reflected back.” - The Observer (UK)

Seven times more buildings of 150 metres or taller have sprung up since 2000 than were constructed in the entire 20th century. Five decades ago, the height of the tallest building completed each year globally averaged around 250 metres (55-60 storeys). Nowadays, they are typically double that height. - Dezeen

"Over the years, I have felt many things in the world’s most-visited, and arguably most-famous, museum — irritation, exhaustion and some wonder, too. This time, I felt joy." - The New York Times

The glass-clad church, perched on an oceanside bluff in Los Angeles County, has suffered severe structural damage as the ground underneath it shifted due to the heavy rains of recent years. It will be taken apart and stored until a new site has been chosen. - The Architect's Newspaper

These raises were part of the museum's first union labor agreement, which was negotiated in 2022. Even so, the issue isn't settled: there's a binding arbitration case about it that's now on hold until a new contract is negotiated next year. - The Philadelphia Inquirer (MSN)

By a human, that is. “I did an event with Leila Slimani where she said she thought her translators know her better than her family. She puts most of her consciousness and her life into her books, and we translators are more connected to them than anybody else.” - The Guardian (UK)

Witherspoon: “When there’s a big economic shift in the media business, it’s not the superhero movies or independent films we lose out on. It’s the middle, which is usually where women live. … So I decided to fund a company to make those kinds of movies.” - The New York Times

That foreign accent students sometimes come home with after studying abroad isn't (or isn't only) an affectation. - The Atlantic (MSN)

Here's his argument. He's wrong, of course. - The New York Times

What Munro did was not so much write about women as write from inside them. When her characters don’t understand exactly what they’re feeling, she expresses it in such a way that you can both feel the confusion yourself and see beneath it to its cause. - The New Yorker

"What does it mean to defend writers amid a polarizing war? When should a group that promotes free expression for all take sides? And at a time of extreme humanitarian crisis that some see as genocide, is a commitment to big-tent dialogue a necessity, or a dodge?" - The New York Times

Stunt workers’ tough situation: “Their work is often flashy, which has contributed over time to the misconception of them as daredevils, making it hard for them to be taken seriously. And they’re often in the spotlight only when something goes wrong. They’re otherwise supposed to remain invisible." - The Atlantic

For one thing, “the U.K. is notoriously more favorable to libel plaintiffs than the U.S., where the First Amendment protects a broad range of insulting and offensive speech." - Variety

Netflix isn’t about flicks anymore. Nor are most of the other streaming services. Instead, they're all about shows - scripted, reality, and live. - Wired

By rejecting the distinction between observer and observed, subject and author (at least to a degree, and more so in the arts and culture back of the paper rather than the newsy, investigative front of it), the Voice was a dispatch from a world unknown to most, penned by writers who were themselves characters in it. -...

You see a lot of this on TikTok now: videos that describe ordinary life using the language of television. Scroll through, and you’ll find users charting the different “seasons” of their lives or highlighting the emergence of plot “arcs.” - The New York Times

Contrary to the walkback last week by Apple marketing communications vice president Tor Myhren — “We missed the mark with this video, and we’re sorry” — the commercial for the new iPad Pro hit a much tougher mark by being both terrible and honest about Apple’s vision of the future. - Chicago Tribune

"It all started with nifty leg movements, strong steps backwards and forwards, paced to Brazilian funk music. Then it adopted moves from break dancing, samba, capoeira, frevo — whatever was around." The passinho, invented by favela kids in the '00s, has been given heritage status by the Rio de Janeiro state legislature. - AP

A 2016 retrospective study that tracked injuries in a professional ballet dance company over a 10-year period found that most dancers experience a new injury every year. Researchers are paying increasing attention to the injury rate at companies, and companies are working to reduce their rates. - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Artistic director David Hallberg and others are indignantly rebuking The Sydney Morning Herald, saying that "critique of dancers' bodies" is "not acceptable." The sentence in question: "The dancers are fabulous, although – and perhaps this was the lighting – (they) seem unusually thin this season." The assessment of the choreography, however, is blistering. -...

"Rather than exams and essays, the studio classes that make up the bulk of BFA programs evaluate students on less tangible benchmarks like artistry, technique, and performance. How much weight are BFA programs really putting on grading — and how much do students’ grades matter during, and after, their time in college?" - Dance...

You'd expect any controversy to be over his decision to have dancers leave the auditorium and perform around the building while cameras transmit their movement to an onstage screen. But no, discussion in France (in 2022!) centered on the variable-gender casting. Millepied says, "They were talking about it on gameshows." - The Guardian

This broader vision of theatrical choreography is worth noticing and applauding. - The New York Times

That is, the ones with more ghosts. - The New York Times

The thing is, “Stereophonic’s cast recording is not pretending to bring the album from the show’s universe into the real world. It delivers finished versions of the songs sparking intense power struggles on stage — which you learn throughout the course of the play are being relegated to album outtakes.” - Vulture

"Spring 2024 saw a frenzy of new shows opening in the face of two formidable obstacles: costs that have nearly doubled over a decade and an audience almost 20% smaller than it was pre-pandemic. … As the Jazz Age attests, bubbles can be fun." But this one may soon burst. - Vulture (MSN)

“In the past, there seemed to be more movement from L.A. and the Bay Area to OSF, especially in terms of artists, so it’s an exciting moment to have a greater conversation and relationship between Seattle and this theater.” - Seattle Times

To put it bluntly, a subsidy meant to support commercially risky work like A Strange Loop or Stereophonic or a revival of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People shouldn't be going to Phantom and The Lion King as well. - The New York Times

"(The $3 million per production credit) has been lauded as a lifeline for the struggling theatre industry, ... (yet) funds often do not arrive until at least 18 to 24 months after the application has been submitted, which can be long after the shows shut on the Great White Way." - Forbes

Alta started Shameless Hussy Press in her garage. “She was having trouble getting her own brash and sensuous free-form poetry published by the mainstream companies, as were her friends, and when she learned how simple offset printing was, she decided to do it herself.” - The New York Times

It's happened numerous times: famous archaeologists (or those looking for fame) claim they've finally found the resting place of the legendary ancient Egyptian queen. Yet they might be right this time. - Artnet

Gina Rinehart, a mining magnate with a knack for attracting controversy and a lack of awareness of the Streisand Effect, is unhappy with her likeness in a series of portraits by Vincent Namatjira, one of the country's leading indigenous artists, at the National Gallery in Canberra. - Time

So strong are the associations between Munro and her origins in southwestern Ontario that for some, the area around Huron County came to be known as “Alice Munro Country.” - The Conversation

"Within hours, Brent became the focus of a high-profile police investigation, reverberating across a horrified international art world that revered him. The murder weapon, a santoku knife, was found right away, in the kitchen. The killer, police say, had washed it and put it away."  - The Wall Street Journal

Peter’s goal, per him, was to have one idea, at least, per sentence. His best mentoring, he said, came from journalists, which makes sense. His reviews have an urgent quality. Breaking news! - The New Yorker