Recordings, concerts, experiences… and Saariaho. It was a remarkable and eclectic year of music-making in America.
Author: Douglas McLennan
How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing The Way Computers Think (And How We Relate To Them)
“A rarefied department within the company, Google Brain, was founded five years ago on this very principle: that artificial “neural networks” that acquaint themselves with the world via trial and error, as toddlers do, might in turn develop something like human flexibility. This notion is not new — a version of it dates to the earliest stages of modern computing, in the 1940s — but for much of its history most computer scientists saw it as vaguely disreputable, even mystical. Since 2011, though, Google Brain has demonstrated that this approach to artificial intelligence could solve many problems that confounded decades of conventional efforts.”
United Nations Drops Idea To Appoint “Wonder Woman” As Ambassador
A petition opposed the idea. “A large-breasted white woman of impossible proportions, scantily clad in a shimmery, thigh-baring body suit with an American flag motif and knee-high boots” is not an appropriate spokeswoman for gender equity at the United Nations, the petition said.
Christie’s CEO Steps Down
Patricia Barbizet “will hand over the reins to Guillaume Cerutti, who left Sotheby’s in 2015 to join Christie’s as president of Europe, Middle East, Russia and India operations.”
The Future Of Reality Past And Present
This story will light up your brain as to the nature of your perceptions of what’s real. “We have completely forgotten what an uncertain world was inhabited by the human race before the 17th century, and we take Newton’s dream as a natural view of waking reality. Well, it was a nice dream. But it didn’t work out that way.”
Shinola’s Improbable, Quixotic Attempt To Build The Best Turntable You’ve Ever Heard
“We’re trying to make it flexible so we can talk to audiophiles, but my goal is to make something that’s simple, innovative, and has a way to expand on it.” He wants to sell you a turntable that you’ll use for decades, upgrading it as you like.
Vinyl Records Are Hot Right Now (But For Classical Music?)
The new shops carry everything from folk to electronica to hip hop, but in many of them, the classical “section” amounts to a single milk crate on the floor near the back.
Study: Watching Romantic Comedies Makes You More Empathetic
“Repeated exposure to romantic films led to increases in sensitivity for four of the five moral intuitions,” writes a research team led by Matthew Grizzard of the University at Buffalo–State University of New York. “At the same time, any exposure to action films seemed to erode those changes.”
AJ Newsletter Tweaks
This week you may have noticed we’re doing tweaks on the design of the ArtsJournal newsletter. I’m trying to make it easier to read and we’ve eliminated the split column. To skip down below the classified ads, click the link at the top of the newsletter and it will take you directly down to the news sections. We’ve also recently added a daily feature that takes one story a day and contextualizes it.
I’d love to know what you think. There’s still time to change things. Send me an email at mclennan@artsjournal.com and let me know. Also would love to hear any suggestions, both for the newsletters and the website. Our newsletters have 30,000 subscribers, and have a significantly higher than industry average open and clickthrough rates. We hate to tamper with something that works, but we’d also like to see if we can do better.
Thanks for reading!
– Douglas McLennan, Editor, ArtsJournal
Why Is There Not Yet The “Great” Millennial Novel?
Where are the successors to “This Side of Paradise,” “The Sun Also Rises,” “The Catcher in the Rye,” “On the Road,” “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” “Bright Lights, Big City,” “Generation X” and “Infinite Jest”? Time’s Lev Grossman blames our increasingly “multicultural, transcontinental, hyphenated identities and our globalized, displaced, deracinated lives” for why any consensus about a single voice now seems impossible. I’d go even further and argue that the “voice of a generation” novel never existed to begin with.