Scream

My pal went into the Donmar’s Measure for Measure expecting a fight. She’d read that Josie Rourke’s production presents the cut-down text twice. The first, set at the time of Shakespeare’s 1604 premiere, where deputy governor Angelo attempts to coerce soon-to-be-nun Isabella into sex to save her brother’s life. The second, set today – same plot but with a female minister harassing a young man. Pal was having none of it.

M.I.T. Makes A Billion-Dollar Bet On AI, Starting A New College

Massachusetts Institute of Technology is taking a particularly ambitious step, creating a new college backed by a planned investment of $1 billion. Two-thirds of the funds have already been raised, M.I.T. said, in announcing the initiative on Monday. The linchpin gift of $350 million came from Stephen A. Schwarzman, chief executive of the Blackstone Group, the big private equity firm. The college, called the M.I.T. Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing, will create 50 new faculty positions and many more fellowships for graduate students.

Australians Are Making Incredible Films, But Sometimes Even Australians Don’t Get To See Them

Whose fault is that? Well … “Many Australian film-makers are locked out of cinemas. Australian producers too often lack the resources to compete with the massive marketing budgets of US films, while Hollywood cinema distributors dominate our screens. Like stocks in supermarkets, the bigger the marketing spend, the greater the shelf space accorded at the local multiplex.”

For Nearly 2,000 Years, The Aeneid Was Europe’s Most Influential Work Of Literature. Why’s It So Uncomfortable Now?

Daniel Mendelsohn: “While our forebears looked confidently to the text of the Aeneid for answers, today it raises troubling questions. … Two thousand years after its appearance, we still can’t decide if [Virgil’s] masterpiece is a regressive celebration of power as a means of political domination or a craftily coded critique of imperial ideology — a work that still has something useful to tell us.”