This week’s editorial musings from magpie’s nest
The quote: A classic is a work which relegates the noise of the present to a background hum, without which at the same time the classics cannot exist Italo Calvino
Upcoming at The Arts Center The Arts Center at NYUAD usually announces its next-season lineup at the end of the summer, but they’d like you to book ahead so the full list is up on the website now. We’ll look at the full roster in more detail after our summer break, but as usual there are some impressive (and of course unexpected) bookings – like uber-cool hip-hop theatre pioneer turned award-winning photographer Benji Reid, a couple of boundary-testing dance performances, a Tasty Biscuits reunion with a heap of musical friends, Lara Foot’s much-praised decolonial adaptation of Othello, and a season-ending return for Kid Koala’s Storyville Mosquito. The 29 August season opener with Faraj Suleiman is already sold out, but you can browse the full list here …
Two-way WIP Karama Arts Club’s latest wheeze is Work in Progress, a public collaboration / advice / discussion session where four creatives – artists, designers, writers, musicians, illustrators, comedians, makers, etc – get constructive feedback in public on an idea, artwork, or project they’re currently working on. It will all happen at Hive in JVC on Thursday 31 July; if you think you might want to be one of the first four, there’s info here. Apply by 20 July …
What’s a city? The third Sharjah Architecture Triennial, opening in November, will have the theme Architecture Otherwise: Building Civic Infrastructure for Collective Futures. As themes go, it’s a bit more explicit than most: the chief curator, Vyjayanthi Rao (anthropologist, teacher at the Yale School of Architecture, specialises in urbanism in India and the States), talked about “exploring architecture through the lens of anthropology … We are especially interested in exploring migratory movement and the rapid extension and localization of urbanism as building blocks of contemporary social life”. So not so much Guinness World Records and starchitects building luxury apartments for money launderers and oligarchs, more the local and global consequences of cities evolving into hyper-connected infrastructural networks … The full curatorial statement is here.
Working with AI Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index outlines a new organisational blueprint called the Frontier Firm to blend humans and AI. The research suggests that companies achieving the best results from AI don’t eliminate human expertise; instead they reorganize around optimal ‘Human-Agent Ratios’. For content creation (like magpie?) the recommended HAR is 1:3 to 1:5, meaning humans should maintain significant creative control while AI handles scaling and optimisation. Good luck with that …
Think of the children On the other hand, Anthropic’s CEO has predicted that AI could kill half of all entry-level white-collar jobs over the next five years (which will include a lot of those internships and graduate entry schemes that give the young a foot on the ladder). Who better to launch a new research and policy development initiative on AI’s economic impacts to sit alongside the Anthropic Economic Index, an initiative aimed at understanding the effects of AI (specifically, Anthropic’s AI product Claude) on labour markets and the economy?
Get doodling The Louvre in Paris is looking for a design for a new entrance on the museum’s east side, plus a separate viewing room just for the Mona Lisa …
Bar none Other people’s ideas of what constitutes an ‘interesting’ bar are on display at the conveniently named Interesting Bars website. It covers a lot of cities around the world, including Dubai (but not Abu Dhabi). It doesn’t seem to be AI-generated slop, instead apparently relying on opinions from Real People, though the six drinking holes listed include only one that would make it on to magpie’s own list …
Red carpet architecture There was a bit of an all-must-have-prizes feel to Design Middle East’s Architecture Leaders Awards 2025 gala last week, with dozens of awards and very few duplications among the recipients; but at least Dewan Architects got Architecture Firm of the Year and fast-rising Soul Road was named Boutique Architecture Firm of the year ..
Art for all One show to recommend this time: No Trespassing is Ishara’s first summer exhibition, with six artists from the UAE and South Asia exploring their relationship with the street (opens 4 July). And Efie Gallery is currently running a programme of Friday-evening films selected by Ose Ekore to support its current group exhibitiontime heals, just not quick enough (runs to 30 July); there are some great titles to see, not least Eltayeb Mahdi’s Al Mahatta and Kalatozov’s seminal I Am Cuba …
Useful app of the week Presentation makers sometimes include a crude timer, but if you really want to known how long it will take to read a speech or presentation you need this free (and basically idiot-proof) tool. Enter the word count (or paste in your text and it will count it for you) and WordsToTime will give you an estimate for both aloud and silent reading times based on slow, average, and fast reading speeds …
Something for the weekend Unzoomed gives you six tries to name the city from the satellite view. After each failure you’re zoomed out to get more perspective, and you’re told how far off your guess was. One city per day. Try it here …
Things we didn’t know no.94 The average human body temperature is traditionally put at 98.6oF, 37oC. But that was based on research done more nearly 200 years ago, since when health and lifespan have improved bigly. So the average today is probably around a degree lower, but no-one really knows …
Earworm of the week Hannes : Friends
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