Short answer: yes. Automattic still employs thousands of people, still owns WordPress.com, Tumblr, WooCommerce, Pocket Casts and Beeper, and still collects revenue from all of them. Longer answer: it just spent two days with two different people claiming to run it, and the board hasn’t said anything in public since. What actually happened On Wednesday the board voted to put founder and chief executive Matt Mullenweg on paid leave. CFO Mark Davies was named interim CEO.

I’m on the side of privacy. I think data brokers are a menace, and when Ireland fined Meta €1.2 billion in 2023 I didn’t lose a minute’s sleep. If Europe wants a law that stops companies from selling where people sleep at night, I’ll help write it. My argument is narrower, and harsher. The General Data Protection Regulation (99 articles, 173 recitals, in force since May 2018) has failed on its own terms.

Everything in this picture came out of the same hill. The vines grow in a thin skin of clay over limestone, the houses are cut from that limestone, and the bell tower stands on top of a church that was never really built. It was dug. Saint-Émilion spent the better part of eight hundred years quarrying itself, and the town you see is sitting on the holes it made. You don’t notice it much at street level.

The studio waited two weeks to say anything. Kusama died on August 14 in a Tokyo hospital, and the announcement came on the 27th, by which point the obituaries had to be written at speed and all of them reached for the same nouns. Dots. Pumpkins. Mirrors. The red wig. Those are fine as far as they go. But the part of her career that changed other people’s institutions, rather than just her own prices, happened in a three-month window in Washington in 2017, and museums have been living inside the consequences ever since.

Pink News has proposed cutting up to eleven staff, its second round of redundancies this year, and the stated reason is a change in how the platform distributes publisher content. The platform is Snapchat. Snapchat generates the large majority of the publisher’s revenue. That last detail is the whole story. Everything else is just the arithmetic playing out. The deal that looked like a gift Platform publishing programmes always arrive on generous terms.

Three years into the argument about AI and content, publishers have sorted themselves into two strategies. One camp licenses. The other sues. A few run both at once, and those are the ones worth studying. News Corp is the clearest example. It licensed to OpenAI in a deal reported at up to 250 million dollars over five years, signed a further arrangement with Meta reported at up to fifty million a year for three years, and simultaneously sued Perplexity through Dow Jones and the New York Post, describing what it alleged as content kleptocracy.

The first thing everyone says is that it’s smaller than they expected. Roughly half a metre of bronze, set in a stone niche on the corner of Rue de l’Étuve and Rue du Chêne, behind an iron grille, above head height. You walk up a street of waffle shops and chocolate windows, and there it is, a small boy relieving himself into a basin while forty people stand in a semicircle holding up phones.

Sylvester Stallone has launched a memoir covering five decades of Hollywood stardom, and the timing makes sense in ways that go beyond the commercial. At 79, Stallone occupies a position in American popular culture that has outlasted several cycles of critical reassessment. Rocky was dismissed by parts of the critical establishment as sentimental before the Academy awarded it Best Picture. Rambo was read as Reagan-era propaganda before action cinema scholars began treating it as a more complicated document.

A museum guide stands in front of Arearea and points. The group behind her looks where she directs them. This is how most people encounter Gauguin — mediated, framed, explained. The painting on the wall at the Musée d’Orsay is one of the most reproduced images in the Western canon: two Tahitian women seated in a lush landscape, a red dog in the foreground, the color saturated to a pitch that has no equivalent in European painting before it.

There is a particular kind of afternoon that WordPress users know well. It begins with a minor irritation — an option that does not behave, a setting that appears to have no effect, a folder structure that persists despite being told not to. It ends, some hours later, in the same place it started, except now there are seventeen browser tabs open and a vague sense that the problem was never really the problem.