Though rich in new American plays and gussied up revivals, Broadway this year often felt like a letdown, taking fewer risks and reaping fewer rewards.
Author: Douglas McLennan
Hey – You’ve Just Won A Nobel Prize. Congrats! Now Here’s How To Accept It
“It’s a formidable challenge, and one winners have to undergo twice (usually, as with Ishiguro, delivering a lecture and a “banquet speech” three days later). But most attempts include at least three of the following elements: profuse thanks to the Swedish Academy; equally lavish expressions of humility and unworthiness (but don’t overdo this passive-aggressively, like Luigi Pirandello); confessing a personal debt to Scandinavian literature (WB Yeats’s entire speech, for example, consisted of tributes to Swedenborg and Ibsen); a potent childhood memory and a recent anecdote showing how grounded in mundane reality you are.”
Big Tech’s Arms Race For Artificial Intelligence (And Why You Should Care)
“The advantages of AI are most visible in firms’ predictions of what users want. Automated recommendations and suggestions are responsible for around three-quarters of what people watch on Netflix, for example, and more than a third of what people buy on Amazon. Facebook, which owns the popular app Instagram, uses machine learning to recognise the content of posts, photos and videos and display relevant ones to users, as well as filter out spam. In the past it ranked posts chronologically, but serving up posts and ads by relevance keeps users more engaged. Without machine learning, Facebook would never have achieved its current scale.”
Where Are The Most Artists In America? Nope, No Longer New York
Los Angeles tops the list on our combined measure of employed and self-employed artists. Los Angeles not only has a larger concentration of artists than New York City based on its LQ, it has a larger number of absolute artists, even though New York City has a much larger general population. Indeed, it’s been shown that a significant number of artists are moving from the New York City to the Los Angeles metro.
In Texas, Prison Inmates Not Allowed To Read “Charlie Brown Christmas”
The publications are among the 10,000 titles banned by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, a list that includes best sellers like “Memoirs of a Geisha” and “A Time to Kill” and even obscure works, such as the “MapQuest Road Atlas.” Not banned: “Mein Kampf” by Adolf Hitler and books by white nationalists, including David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard. They are also prohibited from reading the pop-up edition of “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” “The Color Purple” and the 1908 Sears, Roebuck catalog.
This Wikipedia Competitor Aims To Use Blockchain To Create A Better Encyclopedia
“In January, when the site moves over to a blockchain, Everipedia will convert IQ scores to a token-based currency, giving all existing editors an allotment proportionate to their IQ—and giving them a real, financial stake in Everipedia. From then on, creating and curating articles will allow users to earn tokens, which act as virtual shares of the platform. To prevent bad actors from trying to cash in with ill-founded or deliberately false articles and edits, Everipedia will force users to put up a token of their own in order to submit. If their work is accepted, they get their token back, plus a little bit for their contribution; if not, they lose their token. The assumption is that other users, motivated by the desire to maintain the site’s value, will actively seek to prevent such efforts.”
The Best Dance In New York This Year?
The New York Times dance critics pick their favorites.
Celebrating The Success Of The Museum Of Failure
“When people are presented with a perfect image of something — whether a product or a perfect person — it doesn’t feel authentic. And the Museum of Failure, with its artifacts, feels — and is — completely genuine and authentic. And that’s something that’s not so common today.”
Toronto Symphony’s Budgetary Legerdemain In Service Of Survival
“Revenue from ticket sales was down, while production costs continued to rise. Subscription and tickets were down slightly by 1.6% from $8.6M in 2016 to 8.5M in 2017. Production costs increased by 6.4 % from $18.3 M to $19.6 M. The steep cost of touring to Israel set the TSO back over $1.9 M this year, which we can only speculate must have been a point of contention in the board, which last year saw half of its members abruptly resign.”
Overhaul Of Scotland’s National Gallery Well Over Budget Despite Having Been Scaled Back
“When the project was officially launched just over a year ago it was said to be aimed at tackling the “institutional embarrassment” of how work by the likes of Allan Ramsay, Sir Henry Raeburn, Alexander Nasmyth and Phoebe Anna Traquair is displayed. But it emerged in May of that extending the existing 19th century building by around five metres had been ruled out due to the concerns over the cost and complexity of building above railway tunnels.”