The port of Beirut explosion left close to 200 dead, thousands injured and more than 300,000 people homeless, but it also attacked the very heart of the cultural community of the city. The quarters most affected—Gemmayze, Mar Mikhael and Ashrafiyyeh—had previously been spared much of the full-scale destruction of the Lebanon’s long civil war between 1975 and 1990. – The Art Newspaper
Author: Douglas McLennan
The Need For Facts, The Threat Of Feelings
When it comes to interpreting the world around us, we need to realise that our feelings can trump our expertise. This explains why we buy things we don’t need, fall for the wrong kind of romantic partner, or vote for politicians who betray our trust. In particular, it explains why we so often buy into statistical claims that even a moment’s thought would tell us cannot be true. Sometimes, we want to be fooled. – The Guardian
Minnesota Public Radio Fires Its Only Black Classical Music Host
Garrett McQueen said he was taken off the air after his shift on Aug. 25. He was then given two warnings — one of which was about his need to improve communication and the other warning was for switching out scheduled music to play pieces he felt were more appropriate to the moment and more diverse, McQueen told MPR News. – MPR
Fauci: When It Will Be Safe To Go Back Into Theatres
Basically, a year after the vaccine. Anthony Fauci made his prediction in a 30-minute interview with the actress Jennifer Garner on Instagram Live about vaccines, lockdowns, and the coming flu season. – Business Insider
Jazz Bassist Gary Peacock, 85
Peacock’s personal philosophy enabled him to work with a wide variety of musicians and facilitate great depth in those sessions. In a 2017 interview, he told Ken Bader of the Arts Fuse,“I’m not after my statement or my identity as a bass player or improviser. It’s not about me. It’s about the music. It’s about my responsibility to be in a particular place that other people can share, enjoy and feel something.” – NPR
Film Festivals Lose Something Essential When They Go Virtual
From the outside, many of these events look incredibly glamorous, even excessive — none more than Cannes, with its black-tie premieres in the Palais and its exclusive yacht parties off the shore. As such, it’s not hard to imagine civilians questioning why the world might need such gatherings during a time of austerity and caution. But the truth is, film festivals serve an essential function to the ecosystem of cinema that can’t be reproduced by virtual events. – Variety
Turns Out Most Of Scots Wikipedia Is Fake. What To Do About It?
If there is any reason to think the situation with Scots Wikipedia will improve over time, it might simply be that Wikipedia editors themselves are quite industrious—and, relatively speaking, more forgiving. – Slate
Meet The New Artificial Intelligence That’s Got Everyone’s Attention
GPT-3 is a marvel of engineering due to its breathtaking scale. It contains 175 billion parameters (the weights in the connections between the “neurons” or units of the network) distributed over 96 layers. It produces embeddings in a vector space with 12,288 dimensions. And it was trained on hundreds of billions of words representing a significant subset of the Internet—including the entirety of English Wikipedia, countless books, and a dizzying number of web pages. Training the final model alone is estimated to have cost around $5 million. – Nautilus
Market-Based Creativity (As Found In Nature)
“One could say that capitalism produces greater artistic variation, thereby speeding up aesthetic evolution. But if the species is rapidly evolving toward decadence and possible extinction, then its proliferation of increasingly varied forms of art and music is destined to be short-lived, however ingenious and enjoyable those forms may be.” – Resilience
Janet Malcolm Writes About Second Chances
“When I took the stand at the trial in San Francisco in 1993 I could not have done worse than to present myself in the accustomed New Yorker manner. Reticence, self-deprecation, and wit are the last things a jury wants to see in a witness.” – New York Review of Books