“Good art is good for people precisely because it is not fantasy but imagination. It breaks the grip of our own dull fantasy life and stirs us to the effort of true vision. Most of the time we fail to see the big wide real world at all because we are blinded by obsession, anxiety, envy, resentment, fear. We make a small personal world in which we remain enclosed. Great art is liberating, it enables us to see and take pleasure in what is not ourselves. Literature stirs and satisfies our curiosity, it interests us in other people and other scenes, and helps us to be tolerant and generous. Art is informative. And even mediocre art can tell us something, for instance about how other people live. But to say this is not to hold a utilitarian or didactic view of art. Art is larger than such narrow ideas.”
Month: July 2018
That News Report About The Clay Tablet With The Oldest Known Excerpt Of The ‘Odyssey’? Almost Everything About It Was Bogus
Yes, it is a clay tablet from the early centuries CE and it does have a passage from Homer’s epic inscribed on it, but that’s about all that the English-language stories got right. (For a start, we have plenty of excerpts from the Odyssey that are older.) Emily Wilson, whose widely-praised translation of the work was the first ever done into English by a woman, clears up the confusion.
Next Year’s Venice Biennale: May You Live In Interesting Times
About the title’s provenance as an aged curse with a note of wryness in it, curator Ralph Rugoff said, “In this case it turns out that there never was any such ‘ancient Chinese curse,’ despite the fact that Western politicians have made reference to it in speeches for over a hundred years. It is an ersatz cultural relic, another Occidental ‘Orientalism,’ and yet for all its fictional status it has had real rhetorical effects in significant public exchanges.
How An Isaac Asimov Sex Scene Changed My Life
Slate writer (and trans man) Evan Urquhart: “I knew [when I was 12 that] I preferred old-fashioned books by men for men (or adolescent boys), and I read these as if I were a native rather than a visitor to their world. This stood in contrast to the way I consumed girl culture: by trying to absorb and mimic the attitudes of straight girls … I was trying to play a part based on the adventures of the Sweet Valley Twins, but I could never get it exactly right. In The Robots of Dawn, the third entry in Asimov’s Robot series, I found something else.”
Toasters Are Your Gateway To Artificial Intelligence
Developers who train machine-learning algorithms have found that it often makes sense to build toasters rather than wonder-boxes. That might seem counterintuitive, because the AIs of Western science fiction tend to resemble C-3PO in Star Wars or WALL-E in the eponymous film – examples of artificial general intelligence (AGI), automata that can interact with the world like a human, and handle many different tasks. But many companies are invisibly – and successfully – using machine learning to achieve much more limited goals.
Cirque Du Soleil Is Working With Neuroscientists On Locating And Quantifying The Emotion Of Awe
“In exchange for free tickets to [the Cirque show] O and an upgrade to one of the VIP suites, [60 volunteers] agreed to be poked and prodded, and have their brain activity observed during a performance. Twice each night for five nights, Lab of Misfits techs” – yes, that’s the name of the neuroscience research firm – “wired six of us up with the headgear, and … they gave us iPads that prompted us throughout the show to answer questions about just how much awe and wonder we were feeling at that exact moment.”
Can New Technology Finally Read Ancient Scrolls Buried By Vesuvius?
The scrolls represent the only intact library known from the classical world, an unprecedented cache of ancient knowledge. Most classical texts we know today were copied, and were therefore filtered and distorted, by scribes over centuries, but these works came straight from the hands of the Greek and Roman scholars themselves. Yet the tremendous volcanic heat and gases spewed by Vesuvius carbonized the scrolls, turning them black and hard like lumps of coal.
Barnes Foundation Offers Tours Guided By — Anyone But Tour Guides
In a summer series called “Barnes Jawn(t)s” (referencing Philadelphia’s strange all-purpose noun), the museum is turning docent duties over to a bicycle transport advocate, an Indian classical dancer, a queer Latinx social worker, and a black female comic-book maven.
How Helen Keller Watched Martha Graham’s Company Dance
“Graham, always on the lookout for ways in which people use their bodies to make meaning of the air around them, observes that Keller ‘could not see the dance but was able to allow its vibrations to leave the floor and enter her body.’ … She has taught herself to pay attention using the vibrations around her and is still able to see and hear by following the directions of sound waves created by voices, bodies, and instruments.”
‘Hamilton’ Director Thomas Kail On How The Musical Has Gotten Young People Excited About American History
“We have students presenting their own material, and you’ll see a poem about Phillis Wheatley by a 17-year-old student, and you’ll see a song from Abigail Adams’s perspective. Neither of them are characters in our story, but for some reason they spark for those students. And that’s my hope, that this is just an ignition for something much larger. As a mediocre history major and the brother of a sixth-grade teacher, nothing would make me happier.”