Given the degree to which workers lack autonomy and are at the mercy of arbitrary and capricious decisions by their employer, republican liberty is at risk when it comes to the employer-employee relationship. Without a union, employees are subject to all kinds of arbitrary treatment. With a union, employees have some protection against this. – Aeon
Author: Douglas McLennan
The Weaponizing Of Free Speech
The “free speech” argument can be a useful tactic. But it’s not necessarily a successful one in the long term. Overusing it can turn real debates into insoluble meta-arguments with no room for compromise, driving a self-perpetuating dynamic in which one party exudes a feigned and slyly provocative equilibrium while the other becomes increasingly bitter and confrontational. – Washington Post
A Machine That Responds Intelligently To Queries
GPT-3 is a product of OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research lab based in San Francisco. In essence, it’s a machine-learning system that has been fed (trained on) 45 terabytes of text data. Given that a terabyte (TB) is a trillion bytes, that’s quite a lot. Having digested all that stuff, the system can then generate all sorts of written content – stories, code, legal jargon, poems – if you prime it with a few words or sentences. – The Guardian
Remembering Leon Fleisher
He remained, in critical estimation, a pianist of sublime musical intelligence whether playing with one hand or two. But he also gained renown off the stage as a conductor and an influential teacher. – Washington Post
Greek Theatre On The Rocks
Even before the pandemic, Greece’s theaters were in trouble. Years of austerity saw government spending on the arts slashed, with subsidies for the largest theaters cut in half, or withdrawn altogether for some smaller venues. As a deep recession hammered the economy, tens of thousands of businesses closed down, leaving little prospect of support from the private sector. Dozens of theaters closed; others survived only by cast members covering the costs of performances themselves. – The New York Times
Musicians Fear Disruptions Will Be Permanent
It seems like the entire edifice is teetering. If you can’t pay musicians, you can’t get live music. Culture, while a major economic sector, will likely be one of the last to restart after the shutdown. – Van
Director Alan Parker, 76
He was nominated for the best-director Oscar for the 1978 film “Midnight Express” and again 10 years later for “Mississippi Burning.” – The New York Times
The Gauguin Detective
Born in Calais, France, Fabrice Fourmanoir, 63, might once have been dismissed as a crackpot, a wannabe who would never be welcomed into the sophisticated enclave of art scholarship. But since January he’s gained some standing in this forbidding world, after playing a leading role in a blush-inducing admission by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles that a Gauguin sculpture, purchased in 2002 for a reported $3 million to $5 million, is not actually by Gauguin. – Washington Post
Recreating The Sound Of Hagia Sophia
For a group of scholars, scientists and musicians, Hagia Sophia’s rededication as a Muslim place of worship threatens to cloak a less tangible treasure: its sound. Bissera Pentcheva, an art historian at Stanford University and an expert in the burgeoning field of acoustic archaeology, has spent the past decade studying the building’s extravagantly reverberant acoustics to reconstruct the sonic world of Byzantine cathedral music. – The New York Times
The Radio Audience Has Changed In The Pandemic. But Radio doesn’t Seem To Have Changed
When I pop around and listen to public radio streams from around the country, they almost universally sound like they did before the pandemic started. Same with the programs themselves. Things have changed topically, but not formatically. The audience dynamics have completely changed, so why hasn’t the stations’ sound? – Current