This Week’s Highlights:
The recording industry proposed labels distinguishing “AI-generated” from “AI-assisted” music (Deadline). Set it beside major publishers suing Google over the books that trained Gemini (The Guardian) and a pattern emerges — culture’s markets are beginning to price provenance. When the what can be manufactured infinitely, value perhaps migrates to the who and the how. The industry’s labels point at the machine.
The week also suggested our literacy panic is aimed at the wrong generation. The Atlantic declared a post-literate age, but the numbers show older Americans’ daily reading has nearly halved since 2003 while young people’s is growing slightly (The New York Times) — and Gen Z has built its own robust book-recommendation infrastructure on TikTok (The New Yorker).
And censorship this week mostly didn’t need a censor. A Texas provost pulled an ICE-critical exhibition to manage any “barking” from the state capital (NPR); Moscow’s art scene, further down the same road, has retreated into apartments and kitchens (The New York Times). But a counterweight: pianist Jayson Gillham won his free-speech case against the Melbourne Symphony (The New York Times).
All this week’s stories below, organized by topic.
