The week’s most encouraging data is people rebuilding discovery of culture by hand. Bookstores are booming even as literacy declines (Lit Hub), summer box office has surged (Deadline), and the Book of the Month Club is somehow cool again (Publishers Weekly).

Against that, the machinery of choosing is consolidating fast. Penske Media swallowed what was left of Vox to become the world’s largest digital publisher (TheWrap), Fox spent $22 billion on Roku (Hollywood Reporter), and the Paramount–Warner Bros. merger approval drags on (MSN). Consolidation everywhere.

In Washington, a federal court ordered the Kennedy Center to produce a plan just to stay open (The New York Times). Then the Center board created an endowment named for Trump (CBS News). A House committee moved to axe the Education Department’s only arts grant program (Hyperallergic).

All this week’s stories below, organized by topic.

Corie Benton, President-Elect of the American String Teachers Association, shares the critical role of diverse voices in music training.

A supertall skyscraper, no less, topping out at 360 meters/1180 feet. The great Barcelona architect did a speculative design of a hotel complex in 1908 for a pair of Manhattan businessmen. AI artist Thierry Lechanteur has used Gaudi’s surviving drawings to create renderings of the project. – Dezeen

“The way we consume such content, by swiping idly on a glass screen, stands in stark contrast with the content of the content, the skillful manipulation of resolutely tangible material. It’s ironic, and a bit dystopian, this disjuncture, but I’m entranced by the videos anyway.” – The New Yorker

“When we recognized that people want to go out, that they want to be treated with good service in a good theater with good product, when we recognized that and gave them that, they just came back in hordes more than any other generation.” – Deadline

Architectural history and Antoni Gaudí just weren’t headed in the same direction. – Dezeen

There is no question about its monumentality. It is at once colossal, haughty and ultimately inscrutable—as a great monument should be. The question is whether it should have been a monument in the first place. – The Wall Street Journal

Is this a trend? Are all these pictures related? Common sense, our trusted friend, tells us that life is random and arbitrary and that we’re mostly making it up as we go along. But the conspiracy theory is like a seductive interloper, sidling up to assure us that, actually, that’s not true at all. – The Guardian

“Pulitzer-winning playwright Paula Vogel has teamed up with former Huntington Theatre Managing Director Michael Maso and philanthropist Grace Nordhoff on a new center for playwrights and theatrical composers that will open in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, in 2028. Bards on the Bay will be housed in The Nancy Nordhoff Theatre Center.” – Playbill

City records describe it as a 410-seat performing arts and film theater and the last remaining Chinese theater in any Chinatown in the United States. The theater at 636 Jackson St. opened in 1925 as the Great China Theater for Chinese opera. Over the decades, it also became a movie house and community gathering place. – San Francisco Chronicle

Audiences see journalism as a profession that requires specialized training and ethical integrity, making AI seem to some like a “cop out.” One said about the use of AI: “You can do that as an 11-year-old. You don’t need the training for that if you’re going to use AI to generate your entire article.” – NiemanLab

AI may well be terrible news for software engineers, but I think it’s an intriguing development for people who care about language and ideas – precisely the people who currently reject it the most. – Aeon

“In one day this May, for instance, she tweeted 36 times about the following subjects: boxing, the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, shortened attention spans, Jonathan Swift, Madame Bovary, Jude the Obscure, people who read works of classic literature too quickly, her late husband, the Elizabeth Taylor Cleopatra, the Unabomber, and her cats.” – Vulture (MSN)

The show up at old churches in remote communities, preparing their solar-powered mobile studio, and recording instruments both humble and monumental, whose complex systems of keys, stops, hand cranks, foot pedals, bellows and reeds were designed to vibrate the air around them until it approximates the sound of God. – The Guardian

Post Malone, Meghan Trainor and the Pussy Cat Dolls have all cancelled shows or entire tours in recent months — and while some of them have cited other reasons for doing so, fans have still pointed to their tours as part of the trend. – CBC

What went wrong? The short answer is: The art world expanded wildly, but the art market — the total dollar volume of art sales — did not. In fact, if you read the Art Basel/UBS Art Market Report for 2026 carefully, and adjust for inflation, the data shows that the art market has stagnated. – The New York Times

The Obama Foundation opted not to have the National Archives and Records Administration, which keeps presidential archives, involved in the Center; it will make Obama’s papers available digitally. So what is the Obama Center? Part museum, part public park, with a branch of the Chicago Public Library. – The Christian Science Monitor

And she was singing a patriotic song, no less. In a December 2024 video which went viral, Parastoo Ahmadi performed “From the Blood of the Homeland’s Youth” with an uncovered head. For this “vulgar and immoral content,” Ahmadi and her production team have been sentenced to flogging. – The Guardian

A week after artistic director Tariq O’Meally was abruptly dismissed, an unsigned statement was released: “Dance Place has restructured its staffing model and is reimagining its approach to presentation programming in response to a dramatically contracting public funding environment and its commitment to operating with both efficiency and deeper community ownership.” – Dance Magazine

When the Trump administration removed from the site panels telling the history of the enslaved people who lived with the Washingtons there, the city of Philadelphia sued. A lower-court federal judge ordered the panels restored; a three-judge panel of the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals has reversed that order. – The Philadelphia Inquirer (MSN)

Last month James Murdoch bought Vox Media’s flagships: New York magazine and its verticals (Vulture, The Cut, Curbed, Grub Street), the Vox Media Podcast Network, and Vox.com. Now Penske, which already owns (among others) Billboard, Variety, Rolling Stone, and Artforum, has purchased what’s left: Eater, The Verge, PopSugar, The Dodo, and others. – TheWrap

As with the BBC, Czech national TV and radio are funded by a license fee charged to every household with a television or radio. The current government wants to end that fee and fund public broadcasting directly from the state budget — something many fear would erode the networks’ independence. – Deutsche Welle

“(The item was identified by) Hungarian antiquarian bookseller Ádám Bősze, who acquired the document at a Spanish auction where it had been mistakenly catalogued as a simple page from a musical album.” – Moto Perpetuo