Required Studying

• Jeff Ernsthausen explains for ProPublica how non-public foundations present tax breaks to rich donors — together with, unsurprisingly, artwork collectors:

For the ultrawealthy, donating valuables like art work, actual property and shares to their very own charitable basis is an alluring option to reduce their tax payments. In trade for beneficiant tax breaks, they’re supposed to make use of the property to serve the general public: Artwork may be placed on show the place individuals can see it, or inventory bought to fund packages to struggle youngster poverty. Throughout the U.S., such foundations maintain over $1 trillion in property.

However a ProPublica investigation reveals that some basis donors have obtained thousands and thousands of {dollars} in tax deductions with out holding up their finish of the discount, and typically they personally profit from donations which might be presupposed to be a boon to the general public. A tech billionaire used his charitable basis to purchase his girlfriend’s home, then stayed there together with her whereas he was going by means of a divorce. An actual property mogul retains his nonprofit artwork museum in his guesthouse and informed ProPublica that he hadn’t proven it to a member of the general public since earlier than the pandemic. And a enterprise capitalist couple’s basis purchased the multimillion greenback home subsequent to their very own with out ever opening the property to the general public.

• Screenwriter Simon Wealthy has some bleak information about the way forward for AI-generated humor, writing for Time:

I can’t communicate for each author within the WGA, significantly not the actually good ones. However I’m undecided I personally may beat these jokes’ high quality, and positively not instantaneously, free of charge. Based mostly on the key stuff Dan’s proven me, I believe it’s solely a matter of time earlier than AI will be capable to beat any author in a blind artistic style take a look at. I’d peg it at about 5 years.

• For his or her Summer time 2023 fairy story concern, Orion Magazine‘s Kim Schmidt experimented with the bounds of AI in conjuring up fairy-tale worlds, and the outcomes have been as uneven as you would possibly anticipate:

Each princess StarryAI generated was skinny and white, with unattainable proportions. (It’s unclear if this can be a results of AI’s infamous sexism or if ‘princess’ prompts narrowed the software’s focus onto basic, Disney-esque feminine types.) Both approach, it perturbed me. I attempted being extra particular in my instructions, giving the AI descriptors equivalent to, “a Black woman”, “a fats princess with tan pores and skin and darkish hair”, even “a princess who will not be white and never skinny” – however the software nonetheless saved spitting out pictures of skinny, white, scantily clad ladies. So I turned to the more-than-human world to see if StarryAI was any higher at that.

• For the Guardian, Manuela Lazic delves into the state of criticism within the influencer period, asking, “Who wants movie critics when studios will be positive influencers will reward their movies?”:

It isn’t information that many individuals understand critics as pessimistic writers and annoyed artists who by no means like something – thanks, Ratatouille. If critics can appear harsh, nonetheless, it’s as a result of they love cinema and need what’s greatest for it. They need it to be as clever and life-changing as it may be, moderately than a purely business enterprise meant to make us purchase extra issues. However even that cliche has modified these days. Because the writers and actors’ strike started – in an try to get streamers and studios to remunerate employees correctly – and solid and crew discovered themselves unable to advertise their work, many questioned whether or not movie critics persevering with to write down critiques can be crossing the picket line, additional proof that the distinction between critics and PRs is blurring within the public consciousness. One way or the other, we’ve got gone to the opposite finish of the spectrum: a critic is now perceived as somebody who loves each movie, routinely and uncritically.

• J.Ok. Rowling was lately faraway from Seattle’s Museum of Pop Tradition attributable to her lengthy historical past of transphobia, David Mouriquand studies for Euronews:

Whereas memorabilia from the Harry Potter movies will nonetheless be displayed within the museum’s “Fantasy: Worlds of Fantasy and Magic” exhibit, any mentions of the creator have been scrubbed from the exhibit.

“Whereas the Harry Potter sequence is a significant participant within the popular culture sphere, we wished to provide credit score to the work of the actors, prop makers, and costume designers in our Fantasy gallery,” the publish added. “We discovered that You-Know-Who was an issue, which is why you’ll see the artefacts with none point out or picture of the creator.”

• Over 200 writers signed an open letter urging the Pulitzer Prizes for Literature to incorporate noncitizens, which it traditionally excludes from consideration. Signatories embrace Hyperallergic contributor Religion Adiele, a number of earlier winners and finalists, and a bunch of different figures within the literary neighborhood, who write in LitHub:

From this place of gratitude, and in hopes to talk to your alignment with the previous work you could have performed, we implore you to replace your necessities for the Pulitzer Prize to incorporate the work of our friends who by means of accidents of geography, of violence perpetrated on our lands, and the private familial reckonings with survival, have come to have or have been born right into a blended or undocumented standing.

We have been dismayed to be taught, by means of Javier Zamora’s op-ed piece, It’s Time for the Pulitzer Prize for Literature to Settle for Noncitizens, that within the classes of Fiction, Biography, Memoir, Poetry, and Basic Nonfiction, the Pulitzer Prize requires authors to be United States residents.

• Henrietta Lacks, a Black girl, was 31 when cervical most cancers cells have been extracted from her with out her consent months earlier than her passing. Final week, her household settled with biotech big Thermo Fisher, and Anil Oza and Mariana Lenharo clarify what this might imply for the way forward for analysis for Nature:

However Ayers notes that the circumstances beneath which Lacks’s cells have been taken from her are distinctive, and that this case’s consequence won’t extrapolate to others involving using ‘medical waste’ in analysis. “Litigation on behalf of the Lacks household wouldn’t open the floodgates to litigation by others which have voluntarily donated tissue or cells for different forms of medical analysis,” he says.

Different specialists say that the case does play into a bigger dialogue concerning using individuals’s tissue or different organic specimens in analysis. A lot of the human tissue utilized in medical analysis is ‘waste’ discarded throughout surgical procedure. Even when an individual consents to a process, they need to “have the authorized proper to determine whether or not to permit the use or not of cells derived” from it, says Stephen Sodeke, a bioethicist at Tuskegee College in Alabama.

• Apparently Gen Z-ers in China have began turning mango pits into fluffy little pets, and the results are unusual and cute: