The movie, which features the voices of Beyonce and Donald Glover, joins Avengers: Endgame, Captain Marvel and Aladdin in Disney’s $1bn class of 2019. – BBC
Author: Douglas McLennan
Welsh Community Theatre Settles Aggressive Copyright Claim With 20th Century Fox
The theatre had produced an adaptation of “The Greatest Showman” and the company claimed damages of £200,000. Across seven performances, the show made approximately £40,000 in ticket sales. – The Stage
My Friend Oliver Sacks
“We were close for a long time. I was his photographer, colleague, friend, subject, and occasional collaborator. He used to say that he wanted to take off his white doctor’s coat and see Tourette’s in real life, outside a clinic or hospital. I facilitated this not only as a photographer, but also as someone with access to others with the same condition.” – New York Review of Books
The Summer I Worked For Hal Prince
Let’s put “job” in quotation marks. Being Hal Prince’s apprentice was a huge honor, almost (in my family) like getting into law school, but there were different degrees of apprenticeship. – The New York Times
What Will Boris Johnson Mean For UK Arts?
Johnson threw his weight behind expensive projects such as a new cultural and educational quarter and the ArcelorMittal Orbit tower in the Olympic Park, and relocating the Museum of London to Smithfield. But on other aspects of arts and culture funding, his record is patchy. – Arts Professional
How Should Notre Dame Be Rebuilt? Why, As Though The Fire Had Never Happened
“The idea that an old building becomes inauthentic if it is seamlessly restored is a credo that has been repeated so often it’s easy to forget that this was not the way that buildings were repaired in the past. It was the custom among the ancient Chinese, when an important building was damaged or destroyed by earthquake or fire, to simply rebuild as if nothing had happened.” – The American Interest
Contemporary Opera’s Inspiration? Hollywood
Joshua Kosman: “There is one thing that all of these works have in common. They share the challenge of standing alongside originals that live in a single, unchanging form in an audience’s collective memory.” – San Francisco Chronicle
Who Gets To Participate In Designing The Future?
“Almost all of the major advances in AI development are currently being made in silos, disparate laboratories, secret government facilities, elite academic institutions, and the offices of very large companies working independently throughout the world. Few private companies (as of this writing) are actively sharing their work with competitors, despite the efforts of such organizations as OpenAI, the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, and the Future of Life Institute to bring awareness to the importance of transparency in building AI.” – Nautilus
Spotify Adds 8 Million Users, Now Has 108 Million
Spotify expects to add between 2 million and 6 million premium subscribers in the third quarter, and hopes to reach between 120-125 million paid users by the year’s end. The company also said the audience for its podcasts — a primary target for future growth, in which is has invested hundreds of millions of dollars — has grown 50% over the first quarter of 2019. – Variety
Breakout Hit: Lil Nas X Breaks 23-Year-Old Record For Most Weeks At The Top Of The Billboard Pop Charts
The breakthrough rapper smashed the record this week when the track spent its 17th week on top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart – the only song to do so since Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men’s duet One Sweet Day set the record in 1996. – The Guardian