“Was it really okay, I wondered, to let holograms stand in for once-vital, important artists and carry out new performances? Was this an inevitable development in the interweaving of high tech and art — or did it possibly speak to something darker about our 21st-century morals and our endless quest to be entertained? What did this phenomenon say about, well, us?” – Washington Post
Author: Douglas McLennan
AI Is Getting Very Good At Writing Prose
When the creators of GPT-2 gave the AI model a single sentence referencing J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series, the machine generated a few paragraphs of Tolkien-esque prose—capturing a measure of the author’s unique world and sensibility. – Publishers Weekly
How Happiness Got To Be So Much Work
“Happiness is in many ways the marketing breakthrough of the past decade, with self-care and anti-stress products now rounding out the bestseller list on Amazon (think of ‘gravity blankets’, ‘de-stressing’ adult colouring books and fidget spinners), where they nestle alongside chart-topping tomes by ‘happiness bloggers’. All of this is made possible by a specific, disturbing and very new version of ‘happiness’ that holds that bad feelings must be avoided at all costs.” – Aeon
LA’s New George Lucas Museum Names A Director
On Wednesday the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art announced Sandra Jackson-Dumont as its new director and chief executive officer. She comes to L.A. from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, where since 2014 she has headed education and public programs. – Los Angeles Times
Zadie Smith: Art Of The Muse
“The Yoko Years. The Decade of Dora. Accounts of the muse–artist relation were anchored in the idea of male cultural production as a special category, one with particular needs—usually sexual—that the muse had been there to fulfill, perhaps even to the point of exploitation, but without whom we would have missed the opportunity to enjoy this or that beloved cultural artifact. The art wants what the art wants.” – New York Review of Books
Scientists Figure Out Direct Brain-To-Brain Communication
In a new study, technology replaces language as a means of communicating by directly linking the activity of human brains. Electrical activity from the brains of a pair of human subjects was transmitted to the brain of a third individual in the form of magnetic signals, which conveyed an instruction to perform a task in a particular manner. – Scientific American
Can Painting Murals On City Streets Change How People Use Cities?
The Asphalt Art Initiative will award 10 small or mid-sized cities with grants of up to $25,000 to create colorful murals on streets, intersections, and crosswalks, or vertical surfaces of transportation infrastructure like utility boxes, traffic barriers, and highway underpasses. “Most of the time these projects are used as a relatively inexpensive and quick way to either make streets safer or to reallocate space away from cars and for people.” – Curbed
If You Replace The Choreography In “A Chorus Line” Is It Still “A Chorus Line”?
“A Chorus Line” is the ultimate ensemble musical, a compilation of autobiographical material about the emotional travails and aspirations of Broadway dancers, as they audition for spots in the singing and dancing chorus of a new musical. – Washington Post
School Reading Scores Declined In Half Of American States This Year
“Eighth graders at the bottom 10th percentile of reading achievement lost six points on the exam compared with similar students two years ago, while students at the 50th percentile lost 3 points and students at the 90th percentile — top achievers — lost only 1 point.” – The New York Times
A Clickbait List Of America’s Most Interesting Museum Building Designs State-By-State
We admit, this is just museum building porn, but we love looking at beautiful buildings, and Architectural Digest has compiled a list of coolest-looking museums in each state in America. – Architectural Digest