It got more expensive to go to the movies, and ticket prices hit a new high, averaging $9.38 over the summer. But it’s not just the rising cost of admission accounting for the surge. Attendance is also up over 4% from last year. – Variety
Blog
Ireland’s Old Storytelling Tradition Revived By Rappers And Spoken-Word Artists
“The seanchaithe were Ireland’s traditional storytellers, itinerant poets, entertainers and historians who travelled the island regaling audiences with ancient lore. They thrived for centuries … before petering out in the era of radio and television.” But now they’re back. — The Guardian
Fake Everywhere: How Much Of What’s On The Internet Is Fake
How much of the internet is fake? Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot. For a period of time in 2013, the Timesreported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people,” a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube’s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. – New York Magazine
How A Surrealist Painting Saved The Lives Of The Family Of The World’s Most Dangerous Drug Lord
Victoria Eugenia Henao, widow of Pablo Escobar of the Medellín drug cartel (yes, Millennials, he was even worse than El Chapo), says that Salvador Dalí’s The Dance accomplished something that even the hippos couldn’t: it kept her and her family safe more than once. — The New York Times
Now Here’s An Inventive Re-Purposing Of An Old Church: A Skate Park
“Before its official closing in 1992, St. Liborius was declared a City Landmark in 1975 and recognized as a National Historic Place four years later. Today, it exists as a shell of a church, where the stained glass windows shine vibrant light on skate ramps instead of pews.” — Atlas Obscura
105-Year-Old Music School For The Blind Is Being Evicted — By A Famous Nonprofit For The Blind, No Less
“The Lighthouse Guild sent a letter to students in June — in large print, for the visually impaired — notifying them that [the Filomen M. D’Agostino Greenberg Music School] would no longer be part of the Guild’s future and that it must leave the Guild’s building on West 64th Street [in Manhattan].” — The New York Times
Here’s What Happens When Two MIT Folks Teach AI Software To Generate Christmas Movies
Karen Hao and Will Knight “fed plot summaries of 360 Christmas movies, courtesy of Wikipedia, into a machine-learning algorithm to see if we could get it to spit out the next big holiday blockbuster. Suffice it to say I now empathize with researchers who describe training neural nets as more of an art than a science. As I also discovered, getting them to be funny is actually pretty damn hard.” — MIT Technology Review
‘Merry Jinglelog’, ‘Cinnamon Hollybells’, And Other AI-Generated Christmas Carols
“[The Swedish firm Made by AI] fed 100 Christmas songs into a neural network, then waited for the bells to start ringing. While the resulting tunes are kind of a jingly mess, the titles are genius.” — Smithsonian Magazine
For His Final New York Times Dance Review, Alastair Macaulay Goes To Staten Island
And if that’s not surprising enough, he chose as his subject a local Nutcracker. Why? Well, in Europe he grew quite tired of the Christmas chestnut, but over here, “Nutcrackering became for me — a British dance critic working in New York since 2007 — a happy way to discover America.” — The New York Times
How I Choreographed Childish Gambino’s ‘This Is America’
Sherrie Silver: “Donald [Glover] is somebody who likes to learn, so that made my job easier. I changed the choreography quite a few times. It was really complicated at one point, then I made it simpler, then I changed my mind again and called another rehearsal.” — The Guardian