The race to dominate the personal AI space—to build the artificial intelligence that each of us will use as an all-purpose digital assistant—is closer to being over than most people realize. And Google is poised to win. And if ever there was a business that we can’t let any one company dominate, it’s AI.
Month: February 2018
Politicians Need To Dance More, Says Choreographer Alonzo King
“I’d like to see politicians dancing. I’d like to see the world practicing art. Because the introspection from true art practice can’t lie.” (video)
Frank Gehry Signs On To Fantasy Extreme Model Train And Architecture Project In Massachusetts
The institution is the brainchild of former Guggenheim Museum director and a Mass MoCA founder Thomas Krens, who sees the building as the catalyst for a new “Bilbao Effect” in North Adams, helping to attract even more tourism and economic opportunity to the area. The railroad and architecture museum will be located just a few blocks from Mass MoCA, the town’s creative engine which wrapped up a massive expansion this spring.
How Facebook Has Revived The Epistolary Friendship
“Thanks to the newfound abundance of text-based communications tools, and the social networks that allow us to discover or rediscover potential correspondents, friendships conducted entirely through text exchange are once again the norm. Would these friendships look familiar to the letter-writing friends of earlier centuries, when epistolary friendships were also common? Or is there something essential that we have lost – or at least changed – in moving the text-based friendship from page to screen?”
Research: Neanderthals Made Art Too
“Neanderthals created meaningful symbols in meaningful places,” co-author Paul Pettitt of Durham University said in announcing the findings, which are published in the journal Science. That ability has long been seen as “one of the main pillars of what makes us human,” in the words of the study’s lead author, Dirk Hoffmann of the Max Planck Institute. So this news may be a bit deflating to our collective ego.
When Arendt Met Auden
Hannah Arendt: “I met Auden late in his life and mine – at an age when the easy, knowledgeable intimacy of friendships formed in one’s youth can no longer be attained, because not enough life is left, or expected to be left, to share with another. Thus, we were very good friends but not intimate friends. Moreover, there was a reserve in him that discouraged familiarity – not that I tested it, ever.”
Public Radio Stations Band Together To Buy And Restore Gothamist Blogs
A nearly century-old radio station like WNYC swooping in to save a group of sites that helped write the rules of online journalism does contain a hint of irony. But when you consider these radio stations have managed to weather technological changes from the transistor to the television, the idea that they might be able to help younger newsrooms navigate the choppy waters of the digital revolution—while benefiting from their digital native audiences—doesn’t sound so crazy after all.
How Michael Grandage Is Re-Shaping Disney’s ‘Frozen’ For Broadway
For the director who made London’s Donmar Warehouse into a theatrical powerhouse, “the challenge has not only been to accept the magnitude of expectation fans of the movie would bring into the theater … but also to bring to the fore an emotionality better suited to characters in three dimensions.” And the challenge was all the bigger because Grandage had never before directed an original musical or (as with this show) done an out-of-town tryout.
In 2018, How Do We Handle Classic Broadway Musicals With ‘Problematic’ Male-Female Relations?
“Billy Bigelow hits Julie Jordan. Henry Higgins molds Eliza Doolittle. Fred tames Lilli. And Edward rescues Vivian. Amid a national reckoning with sexual harassment and misconduct, Broadway is mounting a cluster of musicals this season and next that, some theatergoers already contend, romanticize problematic relationships between women and men.” Michael Paulson looks at how the producers and directors of these shows are dealing with these problems.
How Did They Work Out The African Accents In ‘Black Panther’? Let The Dialect Coach Tell You
Slate‘s Aisha Harris talks with Beth McGuire, who “is the director of speech and dialects at Yale, author of African Accents: A Workbook for Actors, and previously worked with stars Lupita Nyong’o and Danai Gurira on the latter’s Tony-nominated play Eclipsed.”