Professor Ahmed Elgammal, of the Art and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., has spent five years teaching his artificial intelligence program to create original artwork. Elgammal fed the software 80,000 pieces of art from the last 500 years. After pressing the Enter key, the software creates new, original works.
Month: July 2018
Twitter Is Making Us All Comedians
As a child, when I heard jokes and watched sitcoms, I considered comedy to be a wonderful, ineffable mystery — like sex, or the Trinity. But the joke formats and memes of social media are training wheels, template-izing comedy for beginners. It’s impossible to look through the microscope at the comedy petri dish all day and not start to pick up on its rhythms and mechanics. For better or for worse, we’re all becoming comedy writers now, in a writer’s room the size of a planet.
A Graphic Novel In The Man Booker Competition? It’s About Time
At the end of the day, the inclusion of “Sabrina” on the Man Booker long list is far from an insult to novel-writing or the written word. Rather, it’s a forward-looking acknowledgment that the literary world is changing, and that art can take unexpected forms.
YBAs of the 19th Century
Remember the Young British Artists of the ’80s and ’90s – Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, and so on? Their 19th-century counterparts were the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, led by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. For the first time, a major museum show has matched the Pre-Raphaelites’ work with that of the Old Masters who inspired them.
Publishing Sales Up 5.5 Percent In 2018
The strongest performing trade format was downloadable audio, where sales jumped 36.1%. Sales of physical audio, however, continued to struggle; they were down 11.4% in the four month period. Hardcover sales rose 11.8% in the period, and trade paperback and mass market paperback sales inched ahead 1.4%. In a bit of a surprise, sales of board books, which had been growing quickly, fell 5.5%.
Survey: Most Americans Think Higher Education Is Headed In The Wrong Direction
A solid majority of all adults (61 percent) believe that higher education is headed in the wrong direction, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center. But that view is much more likely to be held by Republicans or those who lean Republican than by Democrats or those who lean Democrat. While both Republicans and Democrats express skepticism about higher education, they do so for different reasons — Democrats are more concerned about tuition rates, and Republicans are more concerned about their perceptions of campus politics.
How Affluence Is Killing Our Greatest Cities
By trying to improve our cities, we have only succeeded in making them empty simulacra of what was. To bring this about we have signed on to political scams and mindless development schemes that are so exclusive they are more destructive than all they were supposed to improve. The urban crisis of affluence exemplifies our wider crisis: we now live in an America where we believe that we no longer have any ability to control the systems we live under.
Most Academic Texts Aren’t Written To Be Read. Why?
“After I earned my doctorate in 2015, I was left with a persistent disquiet about how people read and write in higher education. Because gutting or breaking a book easily is only possible if books are written in a way that allows them to be gutted easily.”
There Are Three Movies About The Demise Of Gawker In The Works – What Do Ex-Gawker Staffers Think Of Them?
“It’s unclear how many of the projects, if any, will end up panning out, but drafts of the first two have been going around the film and media worlds for a few months now. … But what do the people who lived through the whole ordeal think? We decided to ask the Gawker diaspora, a cadre of writers who were never shy about sharing their opinions, what they thought about the idea of a movie about the demise of their beloved site.”
What ‘M*A*S*H’ – The Book, The Film, The TV Series – Taught Us Then And Teaches Us Now
“Rationality has lost its currency. The people in charge are dolts — masters of manipulation making testosterone-fueled, incendiary moves on the world stage. Patriotism has soured into ugly, gun-loving nationalism, with brown people and foreigners the targets of a nonsensical, hateful rage. … Each morning seems to bring some fresh hell, a reminder that the nightmare is real, and that there is no end in sight. Salvation is found in small, personal connections, in wry humor, and in the forlorn hope that intelligence and decency will ultimately prevail. That’s one way to describe the basic plot of MAS*H.”