Met Opera Lottery Funded by NYC Mayor; Houston Black Theater Turns 50; Affleck's AI Use; Orchestra Lawsuit

Key facts

• New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is paying for 70,000 Metropolitan Opera tickets to be given away by lottery.
• A conservative columnist in UnHerd said the Right should be embarrassed that a self-proclaimed socialist thought of the giveaway first, expecting it to convert only "a few thousand" New Yorkers.
• In Hungary, bookshops file nearly every short Japanese-style poem under haiku, including senryū, and poet Zsolt L. Rakusz said the form took hold because Hungarian poets already had the epigram.
• Houston's Ensemble Theatre, the city's oldest Black theater company, opens its 50th season; it began in a converted pet store at 1010 Tuam Street with 60 to 75 seats.
• Nathalie Stutzmann, music director of the Atlanta Symphony, conducted the first Rienzi ever heard in Bayreuth's Festspielhaus and wants Atlanta to have a recognizable sound like Ozawa's Boston.
• Ben Affleck used AI "for lots of things" in Animals, his Netflix thriller opening October 9, but won't say which, comparing it to a magician announcing the plant in the audience.
• Affleck sold his AI company InterPositive to Netflix for nearly $600 million.
• The San Antonio Philharmonic sued Harmonium of Texas, founded by former music director Jeffrey Kahane, the day before Harmonium's first rehearsals, alleging he used donor and email lists to start it.