Even if nostalgia is a less “dangerous emotion” today than it seems to have been to the Swiss soldiers, it well deserves to be taken seriously and sympathetically. - The Guardian

Your phone mirrors the world back to you. But what you see is the world you want to see—a “frictionless,” “responsive,” “immediate,” “obedient,” “commercialized,” “optimized” simulacrum of your own will accomplished. - The Point

Since the moment I learned about the concept of the “thought-terminating cliche” I’ve been seeing them everywhere I look. - The Guardian

At the core of these deflections is an implication: The hypothetical superintelligence they are building is too big, too world-changing, too important for prosaic concerns such as copyright and attribution. - The Atlantic (MSN)

What defines us as humans is the concept of theory of mind: the ability to track other people’s mental states. Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT have led to intense debate about the possibility that these models exhibit behaviour that is indistinguishable from human behaviour in theory of mind tasks.  - Nature

For psychologists and other researchers, inner speech presents a puzzle – it’s a huge part of our lives, yet so difficult to study. After all, in real life, when it comes to other people’s inner speech, there is no audio with closed captions. - Psyche

Well, yes and no — depending on what exactly one means by "increase" and "ticket sales." - ArtsHub (Australia)

With more than 40 free shows this season, and only 10 that charge for tickets, Levitt has built trust and audiences through a highly unusual mix of adventurous bookings, public and private funding, constant neighborhood-tending, and casual vibes that belie the passion of its music-freak staff. - Denver Post

While 23% of the UK workforce is from a working-class background, working-class people are underrepresented in every area of arts and culture. They make up 8.4% of those working in film, TV, radio and photography, while in museums, archives and libraries, the proportion is only 5.2%. - The Guardian

"Henry Tang, chairman of (the) West Kowloon Cultural District Authority, told the government that it must address the district’s funding crisis by August if its museums and performing arts center are to avoid closure. … The WKCD recorded net losses that (soared) from $111 million (US) in 2021 to $199 million in 2022." -...

Last year, the city of Leeds held a year-long celebration of culture. This year, however, artists and ­creatives in the West Yorkshire city are being forced out of their workshops and galleries, and say the dwindling number of spaces is crushing Leeds’s creative scene. -The Guardian

Historical ideas of what constitutes arts and culture and the roots of racial injustice are being re-examined, and these investments mark a step in the direction of expanding public understanding of artistic excellence and what it means to be an American. - Hyperallergic

Nathan Cole, 46, fills a seat that has been vacant since the 2019 retirement of Malcolm Lowe, who served as concertmaster for 35 years. - Boston Globe

Jonathan Tunick began his career in the 1960s, when Broadway pit bands were big, and orchestrated all of Sondheim's Broadway shows of the '70s. For the Sondheim revivals of the '90s, he reworked his arrangements for bands 50% to 80% smaller. Now he's building one of those back up again. - Playbill

Marking the milestone of 50 years of performing at the Sydney Opera House in 2023, OA presented 30 productions: 14 operas, 13 concerts and recitals, and three musicals. Total box office revenue was just over $65.7m, sharply down from the previous year’s $79.8m. - Limelight

"In a speech following a Cabinet meeting, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan described participants at the contest as the 'Trojan horses of social corruption' and said his government was right to keep Turkey out of the pan-European pop competition since 2012." - AP

Pursuing an aesthetic guided as much by John Coltrane as by John Cage, Roulette became a crucial laboratory for the downtown-music scene, providing artists like John Zorn, Shelley Hirsch, George Lewis, Ikue Mori and many more with space, resources and recorded documentation of their work. - The New York Times

If giving people money encourages them to create, then surely giving them more money would encourage them to create more music, right? The answer is actually no. Throughout music history, copyright’s incentive has often been dialed up too high and, counterintuitively, has led to less creativity.  - The Hill

At least 1,000 paintings that the artist Damien Hirst said were “made in 2016” were created several years later, the Guardian can reveal. - The Guardian

It's not just that the job is delicate; it has to be done quickly, because the site is undergoing a slow-motion landslide due to two winters of heavy rains. The ground under the chapel is now moving at the rate of roughly seven inches per week. - LAist

When her infant daughter became hungry at the museum, says Megan Mzenga, she sat down on the nearest couch to nurse; a male staff member then told her — contrary to the Walker's policy, it turns out — that she had to do that elsewhere in the building and called an escort. - ARTnews

Here are four more beefs between art-world honchos, spanning from the ‘50s to the aughts, that are, regardless of when they took place, truly for the ages. - Artnet

It was a "reassuringly solid result of $346.5m ($413.3m with fees) from its Modern evening sale—within its pre-sale estimate of $340m-$493.5m (calculated without fees)." - The Art Newspaper

Reeling with a $1 million budget deficit on a $4 million budget due largely to "the Basquiat fiasco," the museum wants to re-allocate the $1.8 million it was given from the estate of Margaret Young from its designated purpose of acquiring new works for the permanent collection. - The New York Times

"People attempting to recover from unhealthy obsessions unanimously report a tendency to overthink to the point of debility. Riding the subway uptown to the Scrabble club, I considered the ways I’d replaced one addiction with another." - The Paris Review

The German novelist shares with translator Michael Hoffmann the £50,000 award for Kairos, which "follows the destructive love affair between a 19-year-old student and a married man in his 50s who meet on a bus in East Berlin around 1986. Their relationship comes to embody the German Democratic Republic's 'crushed idealism.'" - BBC

"The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a Penguin Random House division, announced Monday the dismissals of Alfred A. Knopf publisher Reagan Arthur and Pantheon/Schocken publisher Lisa Lucas. A publishing official … said that the restructuring was for financial reasons." - AP

You too might fall for Canada if you’re reading the right romances - and not just the (surging) hockey genre, either. - CBC

Whether they’re from classics or gothic novels, Cannes usually shows some Very Serious Literary fare looking for distribution - and this year is no different. - LitHub

When Munro won the Nobel Prize in 2013, the Swedish Academy called her “a master of the contemporary short story.” The queen of subtly intense psychological stories about the ways rural poverty grinds down those trapped in it, and the price of freedom, died last week. - Open Culture

Most people watching TV are older than those groups. Among cable channels, the median age for TNT and Bravo viewers is 56, for HGTV it is 66, and even the once-youthful MTV’s median-age viewer is 51, according to Nielsen data. The cable news audience is even older. - The Wall Street Journal

"The news presenter has a deeply uncanny air as he delivers a partisan and pejorative message in Mandarin: Taiwan’s outgoing president, Tsai Ing-wen, is as effective as limp spinach, her period in office beset by economic under performance, social problems and protests." - The Guardian

Just like with the plumbing in our house, public radio can’t wait any longer to take action on the leaks in its foundation. They aren’t going to disappear. In fact, more critical systems will fail if we allow the problems to fester. - Current

Trump spokesperson: "We will be filing a lawsuit to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers. This garbage is pure fiction which sensationalizes lies." Director Ali Abbasi: "Everybody talks about him suing a lot of people. They don’t talk about his success rate, though." - Los Angeles Times (Yahoo!)

The actress, who voiced the title character of the Spike Jonze movie about a guy falling in love with a chatbot, says OpenAI approached her last fall asking permission to use her voice for one of their bots. She declined, but says the company created one that sounds "eerily similar." - AP

Netflix and Prime joined broadcast channels for the traditional week of wooing advertisers - and for good reason: “Streaming video now makes up 37% of U.S. television viewing, better than either broadcast or cable TV, according to Nielsen data.” - Los Angeles Times (MSN)

"Dr. Rachael Gunn, … the 36-year-old B-girl known as 'Raygun', a portmanteau of her name, completed a thesis in 2017 on the intersection of gender in Sydney's breaking scene while training to become one of (Australia's) top dancers." - Reuters

Giovanni Pernice, a professional dancer on BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing, said “he is ‘surprised’ by media reports about his teaching methods and rejects ‘any suggestion of abusive or threatening behaviour.’” - BBC

"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...

The reason for the return to larger-cast shows gets at the heart of what makes the 89-year-old company unique. OSF is one of the biggest nonprofit theaters in the U.S., but it’s based in Ashland, Ore., which has a population of just over 21,000 — about one-sixth the size of Berkeley. - San Francisco Chronicle...

"Founded in 1973 as an avant-garde theater project committed to local actors, the Wilma has been renowned for its experimental, boundary-pushing work. ... It is the first theater in Pennsylvania to win the award, which ... includes a grant of $25,000." - The Philadelphia Inquirer (MSN)

Nadia Fall, currently director of Theatre Royal Stratford East, will take over from Kwame Kwei-Armah next January 1. The Young Vic first opened in 1970 as an offshoot of the Old Vic featuring younger artists; today it's an important company in its own right. - The Guardian

Playwright Svetlana Petriychuk and director Zhenya Berkovich have been imprisoned for a year for their staging of Finist, the Brave Falcon. Putin's government argues that the script justifies terrorism; the defendants say the piece is a cautionary tale and observe that the production was underwritten by the Russian Culture Ministry. - AP

To be more precise, there is a play about creating a play about the incident, which made headlines worldwide and got the choreographer fired from two posts. The piece, titled The Dog Poop Attack and currently at the Theatertreffen festival in Berlin, is making rather a splash. - The New York Times

It feels a bit like the Roaring '20s - appropriate since the current Broadway season also features a musical adaptation of "The Great Gatsby." And like the '20s, there are signs of a looming crash. - NPR

Was it because, as a child mathematics prodigy, he wanted to fulfil his real vocation and become a great mathematician? Apparently not. He taught the course that humanities and social science majors have to take in the US university system. “Math for tenors,” he calls it. - The Guardian

Riley Keough argues that the planned auction of Elvis's home in Memphis to repay a $3.8 million loan to her mother, Lisa Marie Presley (who died last year), is based on forged documents — and that not only did the loan never exist, the company demanding repayment doesn't actually exist, either. - NPR

The former MSNBC morning news anchor created the digital news media company Ozy in 2013. Prosecutors allege that, as it failed to make money, Watson falsified visitor statistics, forged financial documents, and had his co-founder impersonate a YouTube executive on a call with Goldman Sachs. - The Daily Beast (Yahoo!)

"British-born, Ghana-based artist Joseph Awuah-Darko accused star artist Kehinde Wiley of sexual assault in an Instagram post published Sunday and said that he is seeking 'legal action.' On his own Instagram, Wiley denied the allegations." - ARTnews

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