Arts, Culture, Ideas
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Good Morning, Two numbers today, and they belong together. Traffic to the ten biggest US news sites is down by a third in two years (Press Gazette). More than a third of web pages published since ChatGPT launched show signs of machine authorship (TechCrunch). The open web is filling with writing nobody asked for and […]
“The private Jellyfish Museum in Pompano Beach, Florida, just north of Fort Lauderdale, … was created by Alex and Yana Yanovsky, who previously developed successful aquariums in Ukraine, including their first jellyfish museum in Kyiv. The couple left those facilities behind when they fled Ukraine following the 2022 Russian invasion.” – AP
Combined traffic to the ten biggest news websites in the US is down by almost a third compared to two years ago, new analysis shows. The difference was even higher across the top 50 news websites in the US, with monthly visits falling 37% since July 2024. – Press-Gazette
The Tang era (618-907 CE) is considered a golden age, a period of territorial expansion, prosperity and high culture which every Chinese schoolchild learns about. Claiming it never happened is like telling Brits there was no Norman Conquest. Yet the bogus idea has caught on widely enough that China’s government is weighing in. – CNN
In 2019, arts organizations in BIPOC-majority neighborhoods of a major U.S. city received 16% less median grant funding than those in white-majority neighborhoods. By 2022, they were receiving 289% more. – SMU Cultural Data
Over one-third of web pages published after the release of ChatGPT show signs of being written by AI, according to a new study from Pew Research released on Thursday. – TechCrunch
KPop Demon Hunters was the sleeper hit of 2025, dominating Netflix’s streaming numbers. The musical-fantasy produced by Sony Pictures Animation has over 600 million views since its debut in June of last year. – Movieweb
Working in the 1960s, when most standup was a succession of one-liners, Bruce used profanity, political satire, and sexual material which comedians today consider a basic right. Yet in his day he was regularly arrested and tried for obscenity; Phil Spector ultimately said Bruce died from “an overdose of police.” – Los Angeles Times (MSN)
Ted Striggles, a dancer and lawyer who combined his disparate skills to support artists both struggling and successful, and to advise them on how to survive, including with his influential 1976 guide, “Poor Dancer’s Almanac,” died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan. – The New York Times
Billed as a “five night only” event, “Hadestown: The Musical” has extended its run in theaters for four weeks, thanks to popular demand. In the process, the filmed stage show has become an indie blockbuster, grossing $20.7 million. – Indiewire
We live in a time when digital systems underpin everything from ticketing to surveillance and building access. Sidelining cybersecurity leaves museums vulnerable to attacks that could threaten both their finances and their collections. – The Conversation
For instance, Sam Eley gives the background on his Basil Crumbwick, whose papier-mâché head makes him seven feet tall, while Katie Pritchard recounts the origin story of her Sir Elton Scone, who hosts a Great British Bake Off-style show which uses no ovens. – The Guardian
In a status report submitted late Tuesday to a federal court, the Kennedy Center outlined its plans to put President Trump’s name back on the arts complex. – NPR
It feels counterintuitive, but at sufficiently large scales, they find, you can often remove any single image from the training data, or every image by a given artist, or every photograph of a given person, and the generated sample doesn’t change. – MIT
What has surprised me, looking back to 1976 (when I started writing for a tiny magazine that sadly went out of business this year) is how much of the classical music landscape has survived, despite the economic pressures that you don’t need reminding about. – BBC Music
Hard as it may be to believe today, Graceland was not an instant hit when it came out, and Simon received criticism for what’s now called cultural appropriation and for violating sanctions against apartheid-era South Africa. Now its influence is widespread enough that it can be hard to perceive these decades later. – The Guardian
The ways that the company’s skill level, repertoire, national and international reputation, budget, and especially school (a ten-fold increase in enrollment) have grown during Sklute’s 20 years as artistic director are extraordinary. – The Utah Review
Comedy writer Brice Vilanch and psychologist Steven Pinker are among those who’ve been contacted by someone claiming to be NPR host Gross herself or co-host Tonya Mosley (not a producer) offering an interview on Fresh Air, displaying deep knowledge of the target’s work, then asking for “contributions.” – The Philadelphia Inquirer (MSN)
The ICA San Diego (not to be confused with the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego) is reducing its staff from 19 to 11, including almost all senior management and public-facing workers. The head curator position was eliminated last month. – The San Diego Union-Tribune
“Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, during a Wednesday press conference, threatened to take over public school districts that don’t remove ‘obscene books’ from their library shelves.” – San Antonio Current
Good Morning, Google has built a tool that tells fact-checkers whether an image was machine-made, whether it’s been altered, and where else it has surfaced (Nieman Lab). Provenance as a service — infrastructure for a question that didn’t really need infrastructure five years ago. Which makes the day’s other verification story more difficult. Harvard is […]
“Disney has a far stronger case against (Trump-appointed FCC chairman Brendan) Carr than Carr has against Disney,” a former FCC chief of staff said. “I doubt any court would uphold Carr’s failure to renew Disney’s license.” Alas, it’s not quite that simple. – TheWrap (Yahoo!)
In May 2025, ten people affiliated with Eksmo, Russia’s publishing behemoth, were detained in Moscow. Three of them, Pavel Ivanov, Dmitry Protopopov and Artyom Vakhlyaev, were charged with ‘organising activities of an extremist organisation’. Their crime was distributing LGBT-themed books. – London Review of Books
“Los Angeles and California continue to struggle to keep movies, television series and even game shows from fleeing elsewhere. … The story of how L.A. steadily lost much of its homegrown industry to other locales is a tale of hubris, escalating costs, political inaction and fierce competition (from other locales).” – Los Angeles Times (MSN)
The fan at heart is a manager of excess: too much feeling, too much weight on too little incident. This is a kind of madness after all, the madness of meaning-making under a few too many constraints. – N plus 1
A Harvard faculty member who requested anonymity so that he could speak openly told me he worried that the elimination of the center could be seen as part of a broader trend of “real boosterism” of AI on campus—one that students feel acutely. – The Atlantic
Today, 52% of Americans say they are more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life – up from 37% in 2021. Another 9% are more excited than concerned and 37% say they’re equally excited and concerned, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted June 22-28, 2026. – Pew Research
Gia Kourlas on champion Caitlin Simmers: “Her undulating torso, her sensitivity to the fluctuations of an unsteady surface and her speed are all part of her power. … Her clarity comes from her deep center of gravity, which allows her to slice up and down waves like a silken ribbon.” – The New York Times
Melancholy, an affinity with oblivion without a concrete cause, suffuses the Hungarian fiction translated for foreign audiences over the past 30 years, from the tortured tales of Sándor Márai to the taut novels of Magda Szabó. – The Guardian
It is tempting to blame smartphones for this condition and conclude that some kind of ban would solve the problem. But a historical perspective shows that this is not enough: reading was in decline before the smartphone appeared. – LitHub
