Over the years, people have asked if I noticed a difference between books on tape and reading print, and the answer is I don’t know. Sporadic reader that I had been, it was hard to say if the words read with my ears reached my brain differently from everything I had read with my eyes. For every study that shows comparably complex brain activity during both methods of reading, there’s a respected author or critic who discredits audio books as shortcuts or cheating.
Author: Douglas McLennan
Why Missy Mazzoli Is The Composer Of Her Generation
“Seven or eight years ago, she started making waves with her chamber-ensemble-cum-girl-band, Victoire, a group with a funky alt-classical vibe that she formed as an outlet for performing her own music. Listening to the band’s post-minimalist drones overlaid with expressive spasms of melody in an electronic haze, playing at the Atlas on H Street in 2011, you might not have guessed that Mazzoli’s work was going to veer into the world of mainstream opera. But on Friday, the Washington National Opera will be presenting the world premiere of her third opera, a 70-minute piece called “Proving Up,” and the opera world counts the company lucky to get it.”
Decline Of The Working-Class Actor
“For British actors, ever-growing division is a fact of life. The erection of roadblocks for working-class actors now begins at state schools, where drama has been squeezed out by slashed teaching budgets and a narrowing curriculum. Then come rising fees at drama schools. Overcome those and you get to chase dwindling roles in soaps and bad gangster movies.”
Is Waterstone’s Books For Sale? (It’s Not A Good Time)
“It’s not a good time to be trying to sell a UK High Street retailer in light of higher [business] rates, Brexit, and some tough leases. That worries me. It’s important that it’s bought by a good owner, but who? It could even be Amazon, which would be disastrous and one would hope for Competition Authority intervention in that case, although they sometimes look the other way.”
Art World Expresses Concern Over The Future Of Ailing Documenta
The signatories of the letter expressed concern that recent decisions made by Documenta’s supervisory board “have considerably damaged one of Germany’s internationally active and influential cultural institutions, and thus also the image of Germany abroad.” They said the city is debating changes that will lead to the “restructuring of Documenta in the direction of a pure commercialisation and marketing of the Documenta brand.”
What, Me Worry? Reading Robots Are Smart But Not Wise
“Advances in word recognition and comprehension can only make AI better at handling those kinds of requests. Machines that can better understand our questions will give us better answers. That could mean a doctor getting more accurate and actionable information with which to base a diagnosis, or a teacher more clearly representing a concept to a student.”
For The First Time, Robots Can Now Read Better Than Humans
“The AI algorithm, developed by Chinese retail giant Alibaba, outscored humans in the Stanford Question Answering Dataset—a global reading test consisting of more than 100,000 questions. Using natural-language processing, the machine-learning model developed by Alibaba’s Institute of Data Science of Technologies beat rival humans with a score of 82.44 versus 82.305, the company said.”
Everyone’s Talking About A Backlash Against Tech. It’s More Complicated Than That
“Our technological evolution is happening faster than most people ever imagined, and it is clearly happening faster than society is able to deal with it. How should we respond?”
How Podcasts Are Democratizing Learning
“In a nation always on the go, it does seem as if the most serious intellectual production and consumption has been confined to the cloisters of higher education, where an elite professoriate soaks in high ideas in paneled seminar rooms safe from the hurly-burly of daily life. But what if a technology was able to bridge the gap, accommodating our culture’s hyperkinetic habits while also bringing to it gems of intellectual wealth from the ivory tower? To a large extent this is exactly what the best educational podcasts—which stress learning for the sake of learning—are doing.”
Study: Broadway Is Becoming More Diverse
“The study, released Monday, examined the 2015-16 season and found it to be the most diverse the group has reviewed so far, with 35 percent of all roles going to minority actors, up from 30 percent the previous season and 24 percent the year before that. The coalition has now compiled 10 years of data on diversity on New York stages.”