Worth a Look

Here are a few posts from last week's Greenpage that might be worth your time...

The NEA At 60, Through The Eyes Of Past Chairs

Butts In the Seats: Last week, the Arts Management program at American University released a series of video interviews with the former chairs of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) on the occasion of the NEA’s 60th anniversary. These chairs are Jane Alexander, Bill Ivey, Dana Gioia, Jane Chu, Rocco Landesman, Maria Rosario Jackson.

 

OpenAI’s Sora Video App Is Jaw-Dropping (for Better and Worse)

The New York Times: The app we used was not TikTok, Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts, the current leaders of short-form video. It was Sora, a smartphone app made by OpenAI that lets people create such videos entirely from artificial intelligence. Sora’s underlying technology debuted last year, but its latest version — which is faster and more powerful and can incorporate your likeness if you upload images of your face — was released on an invitation-only basis this week.

 

Bread and Puppet Theater forges ahead in uncertain times

NPR: Generations of peacenik Americans first saw Bread and Puppet Theater during anti-war protests. Giant white birds on rods soared high over marchers against U.S. military actions in Vietnam, Central America, Iraq and Gaza. Performers milled on the street with bobbing paper mache heads of Uncle Sam and other caricatures.

 

Meet the Experimental Collective Reimagining Set Design for the Contemporary Stage

Architectural Digest: It’s hard to think of a more iconic exchange in the history of theater than the balcony scene of Romeo and Juliet. Those legendary lines. That stolen kiss. It’s been performed countless times the world over. And it was for that reason that Andrew Moerdyk, Kimie Nishikawa, and Santiago Orjuela-Laverde, founders of the Brooklyn-based scenic design studio dots, hoped to reinvent it, when tapped by director Sam Gold for the Circle in the Square Theatre’s recent Broadway adaptation.

 

Malfunctioning drones rain fireballs on fleeing crowd

AV Magazine: A pyrodrone show went disastrously wrong when spectators were showered with fireballs. The incident, which took place in Liuyang, China, saw people flee for cover in panic as sparks rained down.

Worth a Look

Here are a few posts from last week's Greenpage that might be worth your time...

IATSE ratifies first-of-its-kind contract with AICP for commercial workers

Reel 360 News: The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) has ratified a first-of-its-kind contract with the Association of Independent Commercial Producers (AICP) covering Production Department Workers on TV commercials.

 

Exclusive: Broadway Green Alliance establishes inaugural board of directors and advisory council

www.broadwaynews.com: Broadway Green Alliance (BGA) has established an advisory council and a board of directors. This announcement marks the first formal governing bodies of the 17-year-old industry initiative dedicated to educating, motivating and inspiring the theater community to implement environmentally friendlier practices.

 

IATSE on President Trump Movie Tariff Announcement: ‘U.S. Needs Balanced Federal Response to Return Film and TV Jobs’

IATSE: IATSE continues to pursue all policy measures that can be implemented to return and maintain U.S. film and television jobs, while not disadvantaging our Canadian members. Federal policymakers must act to level the playing field and make the U.S. film and television industry more competitive on the global stage. IATSE is engaging with the Trump administration and Congress to advocate for policies that result in those stated goals.

 

Santa Fe: The Hollywood Insider's Guide to the Capital of Tamalewood

www.hollywoodreporter.com: Beautifully lit desert-to-mountain landscapes, authentic Western sets, and early adoption of production tax incentives have long made “Tamalewood,” as New Mexico has been dubbed, a favorite Hollywood backdrop. While Albuquerque boasts a Netflix production hub, Santa Fe continues to grow its infrastructure.

 

DGA President Lesli Linka Glatter Says 'There Is Still So Much to Do'

www.hollywoodreporter.com: “It is no secret that our industry, which is no stranger to rapid change, is experiencing a period of massive transition,” Glatter wrote. “The industry contraction from the dual strikes has led to significant unemployment for our members and all industry workers. AI presents both incredible opportunities and concerning unknowns.

 

Worth a Look

Here are some posts from last week's Greenpage that might be worth your time...

Workers Bear the Burden of Des Moines Metro Opera’s Ambitions

www.broadwayworld.com: It sounds like boot camp. An 89.5 hour workweek. Back to back 14 hour days. Overtime pay a rarity (and lack thereof legally sanctioned). Working in a warehouse where temperatures exceeded 100. Bullying. An open pit with no proper safety barriers. An employee so depleted and delirious that a doctor asked whether they were a victim of human trafficking. People in tears. Others too stressed to sleep. Dozens of employees sharing a single kitchen, with one stove and one refrigerator.

 

IATSE on President Trump Movie Tariff Announcement: ‘U.S. Needs Balanced Federal Response to Return Film and TV Jobs’

IATSE: IATSE continues to pursue all policy measures that can be implemented to return and maintain U.S. film and television jobs, while not disadvantaging our Canadian members. Federal policymakers must act to level the playing field and make the U.S. film and television industry more competitive on the global stage. IATSE is engaging with the Trump administration and Congress to advocate for policies that result in those stated goals.

 

What's at Stake for Live Nation/Ticketmaster? Billions - Plus its Entire Business Model

TicketNews: Two historic cases now threaten Live Nation and Ticketmaster from different directions: the DOJ’s antitrust lawsuit filed in 2024, which seeks remedies up to a full corporate break-up, and the FTC’s consumer-protection and BOTS Act lawsuit filed this week, which targets deceptive fees and resale practices. Together, they put Live Nation’s vertically integrated empire — and the fee-heavy ticketing system fans have railed against for years — in serious jeopardy.

 

Michigan anti-porn bill would criminalize ASMR, written erotica, and nonsexual depictions of trans people

reason.com: An "Anticorruption of Public Morals Act" sounds like something out of the Victorian era. But far from the brainchild of Comstock-era Progressive scold, it's a new bill in Michigan. Introduced September 11 by state Rep. Josh Schriver (R–Oxford), the act would ban the online distribution of material "that corrupts the public morals."

 

Taylor Swift Lawsuit Dismissed: Judge Rules Lyrics Didn't Copy Poems

www.billboard.com: A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit claiming Taylor Swift stole lyrics for 15 of her songs from a self-published Florida poet, ruling the accuser was trying to claim ownership over basic ideas and “common words.”

 

Worth a Look

Here are a few posts from last week's Greenpage that might be worth your time...

Louisville Will Be New Home for International Thespian Festival Beginning in 2027

Playbill: After five years at Indiana University in Bloomington, ITF has outgrown its current venue. Following a search guided by six criteria—mission alignment, safety, accessibility, walkability, affordability, and capacity for growth—Louisville emerged as the next home.

 

Ticketmaster Under Fire: FTC Lawsuit Over Hidden Fees, DOJ Antitrust Case Explained

www.ticketnews.com: Ticketmaster and its parent company Live Nation Entertainment are facing an unprecedented one-two punch from U.S. regulators. In one case filed this week, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) – along with seven states – accuses Ticketmaster of deceiving consumers with hidden fees and by tacitly enabling scalpers to snag tickets en masse[1].

 

Broadway Climate Summit will debut during Climate Week NYC

www.broadwaynews.com: The inaugural Broadway Climate Summit will take place on Sept. 22. Co-founded by Climate Imaginarium, Earth Era Studios, OneUpAction International and 6th Fest, the summit will be part of the roster of events for Climate Week NYC, the largest climate symposium in the world. Broadway Climate Summit will take place at Alliance of Resident Theatres/New York and Ripley-Grier Studios in Manhattan between 10:30 a.m. and 8:30 p.m.

 

'Cultural coffin': Pittsburgh's thespians and universities react to theater woes

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: The three Pittsburgh theater companies exploring a possible merger to help keep the lights on in the face of sharply rising costs have postponed a decision until next year.

 

Remembering Lavina Jadhwani 1983–2025

Chicago Reader: avina Jadhwani built what was by any measure an admirable career on Chicago stages and beyond. Locally, she directed for a range of companies large and small, including Silk Road Rising (now Silk Road Cultural Center), Writers Theatre, Oak Park Festival Theatre, and Rasaka Theatre Company. Nationally, her productions could be seen at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Asolo Repertory Theatre in Florida, and the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. Her adaptation of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol also graced the Guthrie stage every year starting in 2021 and returns this season.

 

Worth a Look

Here are a few posts from last week's Greenpage that might be worth your time...

Caesars Palace Casino Denied Approval to Open in Times Square After Final Vote

www.broadwayworld.com: The bid for a casino to open in Times Square has been denied after a final vote this morning. A community advisory committee denied the plan after a 4-2 vote. A two-thirds majority vote was required for the proposal to advance to consideration by New York State for one of three downstate casino licenses.

 

National Theatre to use home-grown dye in sustainability push

www.thestage.co.uk: The National Theatre has committed to using natural dye for all its future productions, which it will make from plants grown in its newly launched well-being garden. The venue says the innovation marks a "clear statement" of its intention to improve its sustainability and "future-proof" its work in accordance with recommendations laid out in the Theatre Green Book.

 

The big-screen gamble: How movie theaters are fighting to stay alive

Salon.com: It’s a lonely life, being a superfan of Judd Apatow’s 2015 romantic comedy, “Trainwreck.” When the film, starring and written by Amy Schumer, opened in July of that year, it was lauded by critics and audiences as a refreshing take on a well-tread genre. “Trainwreck” even overperformed at the box office, raking in cash well beyond initial estimates.

 

CMU Alumni Emmy Winners Showcase Steady Results of Arts Excellence

News - Carnegie Mellon University: Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Drama empowers students to balance technical precision and artistic expression with its consistent influence on society and culture, evident most recently at the 77th Emmy Awards.

 

Work Visa Issues Threatening Music Artist Careers, Support Networks

www.billboard.com: Just a day before his sold-out show at the AT&T Stadium in Texas, regional Mexican star Julión Álvarez posted an “urgent” announcement on his social media, informing the 50,000 fans who purchased a ticket to the May 24-dated show that it was cancelled.

 

Worth a Look

Here are a few posts from last week's Greenpage that might be worth your time...

The 1/52 Project Reveals Twelve 2025 Early Career Designer Recipients

www.broadwayworld.com: The 1/52 Project, the financial grant program founded by Tony Award-winning set designer Beowulf Boritt, revealed the twelve early-career designer recipients selected for the 2025 cycle to benefit from $165,000.00 in grants.

 

These Theatre Kids Won the Fight Against Proposed Anti-Arts Measures at an Arizona School Board Meeting

Playbill: Arts educators and advocates successfully killed a proposed move in Arizona's Peoria Unified school district to bar arts educators from renewing memberships in their professional associations, including but not limited to the Educational Theatre Association, National Association for Music Education, National Dance Education Organization, and National Art Education Association.

 

Judge: Anthropic’s $1.5B settlement is being shoved “down the throat of authors”

Ars Technica: At a hearing Monday, US District Judge William Alsup blasted a proposed $1.5 billion settlement over Anthropic's rampant piracy of books to train AI. The proposed settlement comes in a case where Anthropic could have owed more than $1 trillion in damages after Alsup certified a class that included up to 7 million claimants whose works were illegally downloaded by the AI company.

 

Oklahoma AG on the First Amendment and Drag Shows

Reason.com: Such drag shows are protected unless they fit within the (fairly narrow) category of obscenity, which is limited to certain material that depicts sexual conduct (not just cross-dressing).

 

Welcome to the Creator Revolution

Guest Column - TheWrap: When a single YouTube video commands more views than a blockbuster premiere, when a TikTok Creator can launch a global trend overnight and when communities once overlooked by Hollywood are finding their voices through creators, it’s clear that a new level of opportunity for the entertainment industry has been unlocked. Creators are expanding the industry’s reach and helping to reshape its future (literally!), and the impact they are having is undeniable and transformative.

 

Worth a Look

Here are a few articles from last week's Greenpage that might be worth your time...

Corporation for Public Broadcasting to Get TV Academy Governors Award

variety.com: As it prepares to shut down after nearly 60 years of service, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting will be honored with one of the Television Academy‘s top prizes, the 2025 Governors Award. The news is bittersweet, as it comes following President Trump’s move kill federal funding for public media.

 

Taylor Sheridan, Paramount establish massive production hub in Texas

Reel 360 News: Taylor Sheridan, the creative force behind Yellowstone, Tulsa King, and Landman, has teamed up with Paramount Television and real estate developer Hillwood to launch Texas’s largest-ever film and TV production campus in Fort Worth.

 

Climbing the Ladder: Theater Women on Learning and Leading by Sonya Hayden

WIT journal: In an industry built on relationships and where the steps to building a career can feel murky, mentorship is essential. This is particularly true for women, who remain underrepresented in many fields across the theater industry, as documented by various organizations including RISE Theatre’s network partners and The Lillys. Sometimes all we need is someone to open a door, show us that a door exists, answer a question, or encourage us to send that cold email.

 

Hackers Threaten to Submit Artists' Data to AI Models If Art Site Doesn't Pay Up

www.404media.co: Artists&Clients is a website that connects independent artists with interested clients. Around August 30, a message appeared on Artists&Clients attributed to the ransomware group LunaLock. “We have breached the website Artists&Clients to steal and encrypt all its data,” the message on the site said, according to screenshots taken before the site went down on Tuesday.

 

Sign of Inclusivity: 'Another Kind of Silence' at City

onstagepittsburgh.com: It was no exaggeration when City Theatre announced that Another Kind of Silence, the world-premiere play that leads off its 2025-2026 season, “is one of the most ambitious shows the company has taken on.” Bilingual and bicultural, the plot unfolds simultaneously in English and American Sign Language (ASL), along with some Greek Sign Language, as Evan and Chap, two already-partnered queer women, cross paths in modern-day Greece and find themselves falling in love.

 

Worth a Look

Here are a few posts from last week's Greenpage that might be worth your time...

Pittsburgh Public Theater, City Theatre & CLO to join forces to survive

90.5 WESA: The years since the pandemic shutdown have been especially difficult for nonprofit performing-arts groups, in terms of both selling tickets and raising funds. On Friday, three of Pittsburgh’s most venerable troupes announced they are looking into ways they might join forces to survive.

 

2,400 People Sign Letter Decrying Maybe Happy Ending Casting Decision

Playbill: Maybe Happy Ending's decision to replace lead actor Darren Criss with Andrew Barth Feldman has continued to provoke responses throughout the theatre community. The latest: an open letter written by Tony Award winner BD Wong and signed by over 2,400 people, many of them theatre artists, including two-time Tony winner Donna Murphy, and Tony winners Francis Jue, Ruthie Ann Miles, and Ali Stroker.

 

Safety Commission Drops Planned Consumer Table Saw Rule

Engineering News-Record: Efforts by safety advocates to make table saws safer for all uses and projects—with an automatic brake that senses the difference between a finger and wood and stops cutting—have entered a new phase. On August 20, the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) withdrew its pending rule requiring sensor-activated brakes that had advanced under the Biden administration.

 

The problem with Auschwitz-Birkenau’s new digital camp replica

theconversation.com: At this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum announced the launch of a new digital replica of the concentration camp for filmmakers. Titled Picture from Auschwitz, the virtual film location is designed to facilitate a range of productions set on the grounds, where preservation regulations currently restrict filming to documentaries.

 

White House Lists Smithsonian Exhibits It Finds Objectionable

The New York Times: The White House published a list of Smithsonian exhibits, programming and artwork it considered objectionable on Thursday, one week after announcing that eight of the institution’s museums must submit their current wall text and future exhibition plans for a comprehensive review.

Ellipses...

Since we're going to be without "Worth a Look" posts for a while maybe I should actually write something...  Campus has been downright sleepy this week.  I keep going occasionally since it is easy.  It must not be easy for most...  Today we had our first snag after changing health insurance carriers.  The consent decree isn't all that apparently.  Looking for a new doc...  Although it was spread across two locations I went to the gym five days this week.  I think it is unlikely that will happen again...  That posit I made in the last post about an additional database and a more efficient query?  Gemini says it is possible and a better idea.  Maybe I'll try to implement it in the next few weeks...  We went to the first of what I am sure will be many many child performing arts shows last night: K though 12 dance recital.  It was better than it sounds...  We have this plumbing vent in our driveway with a cracked grate I have been meaning to repair maybe since we moved in here.  I made an honest effort yesterday - talked to a plumber and everything.  It appears that the part I need may not be manufactured anymore.  I cloodged what I could find into service, but I would still like to have the real one...  Pretty serious rain here today.  I used to like rain.  Now less so...  Purdue Global is a rebranding of Kaplan University.  Just in case it comes up in an online search you happen to be doing...  I was thinking today how formative my going to Tomcat U turned out to be all those years ago.  That trip took us to FTSI Navigator and everywhere we've been down that road.  All from one professional development trip...  Writing blog posts without really talking about kids or politics is pretty difficult...  I am starting a couple of summer lists.  Being that one month is gone already I might be behind, even though I am technically off...

Something New

For a while now I have had an idea that the Greenpage could use a display that shows what the top sources are for the page.  During the academic year I post 60 articles a week.  It seemed like a nice feature would be to have a display that showed where the majority of the posts were coming from - with a link.  It also felt a little bit like an informal attribution; an additional plug for the source publications that were filling out the page.

I've probably had this on my to do list for more than a couple of years. It sat there unexecuted because I figured the coding I would need was beyond my ability.  I had noodled around with the idea of tasking it to a student assistant with programming chops or maybe looking for someone elsewhere on campus.  There had to be someone in the community that could do it.

Today I asked Gemini.  I've been thinking about how to integrate AI applications into what I do.  I keep seeing stories saying that if you don't come up to speed using AI assistants you will be helping to obsolete yourself.  I actually started a few days ago by asking if the assistant could craft some automation around the comments students do for class.  Years ago I had student assistants read and correct every comment for spelling and grammar.  It proved to be a tedious, repetitive, thankless task (beyond being paid - that's another post).  The nature of the thing meant it wasn't too long lived as a student assistant task.  I wondered if an AI assistant could give me a way to automate it.

Suffice it to say that the assistant totally thinks it can and it showed me sample code to get it going.  The process requires integration of Blogger, RSS, Google Sheets, and Gmail - plus a third party grammar checker.  Reading the responses from Gemini made my head hurt and reminded me just how far we've come from 10 PRINT "David "; :GOTO 10.  I was going to need a little bit of a ramp.

That lead me to think about the page display I wanted to add.  So I started again and took a swing at that.

This one turns out to be a lot less complicated, initially only working with Blogger itself.  There was however an initial bump in the road.  The Newspage Blog has nearly 60,000 posts since its inception.  Doing a gadget in the blogger template doesn't rally come with any memory or storage, it does everything in real time.  That meant in a simple application the gadget on the page was going to have to count the instances of each source on the page for all 60k posts on every page view.  That felt... stupid.  I am sure there is a more complicated solution where I could do a Google Sheet with historical data and a script where every day it updates the count based on that days articles.  That way the gadget would just have to look up one set of values on the page load rather than do the actual counting.  But that felt like it was leading down the road I had been on before and abandoned to get to here in the first place.  So I moved the goalposts.

The new display would show the most commonly used sources in the past 30 days.  This is a little more complicated as it requires using the ATOM feed, but that was already set up anyway.  You can still see the process thinking, but it doesn't need to chug the way it would have for the original idea.  Once the new result set was defined the work was mostly about stripping out the formatting Gemini thought made the output look good.  It wasn't wrong, but to get it to show properly in the existing blog template using the very least amount of formatting made the most sense.

Which leaves us with:

Loading top sources...

TADA! 

Which I guess is current and will update here as the page updates as well.  I will have to monitor it as the posting numbers go up in the fall and as the queries go up with the increased page views but based on the tools involved I don't think it should develop any problems.  I guess we'll see.

It isn't exactly what I was looking for.  But I guess it is a nice improvement and a decent first step.