This Week’s Highlights:
With AI flooding the zone, the literary world is struggling to figure out an infrastructure to certify what’s human. The Commonwealth Short Story Prize ran its winners through a forensic review and publicly cleared them as AI-free (The Bookseller), while Granta, rattled by the same anxiety, said it will stop publishing outside prize winners it can’t vet (The Guardian). Meanwhile, The Atlantic produced a map (The Atlantic) of what music has been subsumed into the GenAI models.
Some unexpectedly good news in funding this week. Manhattan’s borough president routed his entire $50 million discretionary budget to the arts (The New York Times); Eugene Ballet woke to an unsolicited $1 million gift (Oregon ArtsWatch). And four small colleges added dance majors even while others have been cutting the humanities (Dance Magazine).
Then there was an account of Smithsonian chief Lonnie Bunch’s diplomacy at lunch with Trump while he spent the week working to keep the Smithsonian functional under political pressure (The Atlantic). Sadly, despite judicial decisions, the poor Kennedy Center still isn’t out of the wood. Leadership declared that while it will stay open (as the judge decreed, it isn’t required to book anyone at all (AP).
All this week’s stories below, organized by topic.
