The incredible economic tech bubble Seattle is experiencing is pushing out film and music jobs and companies. As people have had to make the hard choice to leave town to pursue their careers, Seattle is also losing that sense of a creative community that once made it worth all the other struggles. – The Stranger
Author: Douglas McLennan
Don’t Hear As Well As You Used To? Here’s Why
“There have been a couple of studies done with populations of indigenous people who live in places where there is very little background noise and elderly people in those populations tend to hear as well as infants do.” – NPR
Russia’s Greatest Napoleonic Reenactor (That’s A Thing, Apparently) Pulled Drunk Out Of River With His Girlfriend’s Arms In His Backpack
Having been fished out of the Moika River early Saturday morning with a backpack containing a woman’s severed arms, he was in the Mariinsky Hospital, still very much alive but recovering from hypothermia and facing a murder charge. – Washington Post
Comedian David Mitchell: The Internet Has Been A Disaster For Culture
“Genuinely, I think the internet and the smartphone have been a disaster for civilisation,” he says. “I think it would be very helpful for us to see it as a disaster, see it as something like nuclear weapons or . . . I was going to say the invention of heroin, but morphine is a wonder drug, so there’s an upside to heroin which I really can’t f**king see with the internet. It’s easier to get taxis, but that’s it. It’s addictive. It changes the nature of discourse in a horrible way. What was billed as the democratisation of knowledge has turned into the death of truth.” – Irish Times
Dance As Opportunity In The Slums Of Rio
The violence, the hopelessness and the misery in the slums of Rio de Janeiro are all a direct result of the lack of guidance, role models or future prospects — except drug trafficking — for young people. That’s why the 31-year-old Daiana began offering young girls an alternative: a ballet school in the favela. – Der Spiegel
UK Publishers, Booksellers Wrestle With Selling Right Wing Books
With a divisive election looming and rising rates of hate crime, the question of how best to engage with opposing views is, says David Shelley of the publishing giant Hachette, hotly debated in acquisitions meetings. “It’s important to uphold free speech, but social justice is also a big part of our mission,” he says. He is proud that Hachette publishes authors from across the political spectrum, from Labour’s Jess Phillips to the controversial rightwing commentator Rod Liddle. “But we wouldn’t want to publish any book that played a part in oppressing minorities, or went against our inclusive ethos.” – The Guardian
Art Auction Guarantees Are Losing Popularity. Will This Crash The Market?
After an unprecedented expansion in recent years, third-party guarantees may have lost their magic. Their use appears to have peaked. Now, the trade is left wondering: Have guarantees become too popular for their own good? And what will happen to the market if a tool it once relied on is put back in the shed? – Artnet
Machines Become More Creative When They’re Allowed To Wander
Because of biology’s track record, Kenneth Stanley and others have come to believe that if we want algorithms that can navigate the physical and social world as easily as we can — or better! — we need to imitate nature’s tactics. Instead of hard-coding the rules of reasoning, or having computers learn to score highly on specific performance metrics, they argue, we must let a population of solutions blossom. Make them prioritize novelty or interestingness instead of the ability to walk or talk. They may discover an indirect path, a set of steppingstones, and wind up walking and talking better than if they’d sought those skills directly. – Quanta
Last Year Archaeologists Dated Cave Paintings In Spain Back To The Neanderthals. Were They Wrong?
Published in the Journal of Human Evolution, the critique, led by New York University archaeologist Randall White and co-authored by 44 international researchers, suggests that the dating technique used in the earlier report might not be reliable. “There is still no convincing archaeological evidence that Neanderthals created [southwestern European] cave art,” the document states. – Artnet
French Theatre That Kids Find More Compelling Than Their Screens
In an era of limitless on-demand entertainment, the timeworn art of French marionette theater continues to capture minds and hearts in this country in ways that smartphones, video games and the most seducing technologies can’t. – The New York Times