The thing about tech is that even if you can see it coming, you can’t be sure quite how it will arrive or what it will do when it gets here. – The Guardian
Author: Douglas McLennan
It’s A Wildly Inventive Time For Jazz (But Not A Golden Age)
“The music is meant to evolve, and we’re in the midst of its most wildly adaptive, thrillingly unruly evolutionary phase in some 40 years. So why do I balk whenever someone declares that jazz has entered another golden age?” – The New York Times
Survey: Who’s Swayed By Social Media Influencers?
The survey of more than 1,000 shoppers was carried out for Radio 4’s You and Yours by consumer analysts Savvy Marketing. It found that 54% of 18-to-34-year-old beauty buyers were influenced by their suggestions. – BBC
A New Chapter On Restitution Of Plundered Art
All eyes are now on France. Despite the legal hurdles, restitutions are possible but only through a drawn-out process. President Macron’s decision earlier this month to return 26 plundered items to Benin “without delay” will have to be approved by parliament. Similarly, when the Muséum de Rouen discovered a “toi moko”—a tattooed head of an ancient Maori warrior—in its collection in 2011, restitution to New Zealand had to be approved by a special act of parliament, which took four years. – The Art Newspaper
Our Fears As Expressed By The Lessons Of Other Cities
Our deepest anxieties about the future of where we live are embodied in other cities — in Portlandification, Brooklynification, Manhattanization. The comparison is seldom a compliment. You don’t want to become Manhattan (too dense), Portland (too twee), Boston (too expensive), Seattle (too tech-y), Houston (too sprawling), Los Angeles (too congested), Las Vegas (too speculative), Chicago (too indebted). – The New York Times
Live-streaming Games Is The New Media Frontier
From a critical remove, streaming is a strangely liminal space, one not yet secure in its place in the media landscape. It’s a land of opportunity and nonsense, a media format beyond its Wild West stage yet not quite formed into something that can be subjected to mainstream media analysis. Streaming is a place for big-time, multi-million-dollar celebrities. It’s also a place where marginalized people form communities around games and people they love, where niche gaming communities like speedrunning can grow healthily. – Wired
How San Antonio Got a Free Scholar’s Rock
One day in December, Katherine Luber, director of the San Antonio Museum of Art, two curators and a museum trustee wandered around a rock yard in China that looked more like a moonscape than a landscape –
Judith H. Dobrzynski
Fake Images Created By AI Are Getting So Good They’re Hard To Spot
The end result is similar to a trick often used in Hollywood. Superheroes, aliens, and the simians in Planet of the Apesmovies are animated by placing markers on actors’ faces and bodies so they can be tracked in 3-D by special cameras. – Wired
The BBC’s Film Critics Show On TV Goes Bust
The BBC has promised to replace Film with another show, but the challenge is how do you cover movies for a BBC One audience? The problem the BBC has is that movie broadcasting has been subject to a populist online revolution.
IRS: Aretha Franklin Owed $6+ Million In Back Taxes
The IRS “proof of claim” filings entered Dec. 12 and 19 say the amount owed is cumulative, beginning with an unpaid assessed balance of $1,305,403 in December 2012 and including $552,718 due by the end of this year. – The Daily Beast