Author: Matthew Westphal

For American TV, Has Australia Become A Shangri-La?

Damien Cave: “Our dry, sunny isle far from swampy Washington seems to be the latest pinup for the American desire to check out and start over. It reminds me a bit of Hawaii in the 1970s and ’80s (the era of Fantasy Island, Gilligan’s Island, and Magnum P.I.) and more recently with Lost. Or to go further back, it’s what Mexico was for Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac and the Beats in the 1950s and ’60s — a place of great beauty where familiar rules and conflicts could be sidestepped or ignored.”

Google At 20: It Changed Our Entire Relationship To Information And Became A Cultural Force In Its Own Right

It’s strange to consider that a company so fundamental to our world is still so relatively young. … Sergey Brin and Larry Page defeated their competition so soundly and so effectively that competitors like Excite, Lycos, and AltaVista are blips in the internet’s long history, despite once being hugely important platforms.”

Optimism Lost? Or Merely Moved? A Brief History Of World’s Fairs

From the earliest expositions in London and Paris, through the early 20th-century fairs that introduced such American cities as St. Louis, Chicago, Buffalo, and San Francisco to the world, the starry-eyed futurism of the New York fair in 1939, and the coming-out parties of Seattle, (’62), Osaka (’70), Montreal (’67), and post-dictatorship Seville (’92) and Lisbon (’98), World’s Fairs announced that their host cities were open for business and a bright future was coming. Then they lost their luster? No, in fact — like so much manufacturing, they went to Asia. “How much optimism or innocence one might think World’s Fairs have lost,” writes Darran Anderson, “depends on how much one believes they had to begin with.”

Three Latter-Day Alan Sokals Publish Series Of Bogus Articles In Academic Journals

“One paper, published in a journal called Sex Roles, said that the author had conducted a two-year study involving ‘thematic analysis of table dialogue’ to uncover the mystery of why heterosexual men like to eat at Hooters. Another, … published in a journal of feminist social work and titled ‘Our Struggle Is My Struggle,’ simply scattered some up-to-date jargon into passages lifted from Hitler’s Mein Kampf.” The three came clean this week, writing that their aim was to expose the problem of what they call “academic grievance studies.”

‘Academic Grievance Studies And The Corruption Of Scholarship’: The Paper In Which The Hoaxster Professors Reveal Themselves

“Something has gone wrong in the university — especially in certain fields within the humanities. Scholarship based less upon finding truth and more upon attending to social grievances has become firmly established, if not fully dominant, within these fields, and their scholars increasingly bully students, administrators, and other departments into adhering to their worldview. This worldview is not scientific, and it is not rigorous. For many, this problem has been growing increasingly obvious, but strong evidence has been lacking. For this reason, the three of us just spent a year working inside the scholarship we see as an intrinsic part of this problem.”

New AI Program Will Let Non-Pros Erase Things From Photos

“Upload a photo, define what you’d like to see removed, and [MIT Media Lab’s] Deep Angel will try to seamlessly erase whatever it is you want gone. The purpose of all this … is part media literacy, part experiment. Normally, the power to disappear people from images and the public record has only been wielded by governments, powerful heads of state and folks who crop others out of their profile pictures. Deep Angel, hopefully, will get you thinking about what it means to actually have the power to easily and seamlessly control what appears in images and what cannot.” (Uh-huh. Hopefully.)

Disney Has Invented A Spray-Painting Drone

And no, it’s not for graffiti. (Just imagine Disney graffiti.) “PaintCopter [is] a drone that can autonomously spray paint both flat and 3D surfaces. Disney Research says the goal is to be able to paint large surfaces without the need for scaffolding and ladders. … You can see the drone in action in the video below, and while its painting skills still leave a bit to be desired, you can imagine where this work is headed.”

At Long Last, Balanchine’s Own Stars Are Back At New York City Ballet To Coach

“Amid [its current] turmoil, the company faces an artistic challenge: The sudden dearth of experienced ballet masters who worked with Balanchine.” (Many of them had been kept away from the company by Balanchine’s successor, the just-retired Peter Martins.) “Now it’s not just the dancers who need coaches, but also a new generation of ballet masters, including Rebecca Krohn, Glenn Keenan, Craig Hall and Jonathan Stafford.” So Stafford has brought in Patricia McBride, Edward Villella, and Mimi Paul, all of whom worked closely with Mr. B. Gia Kourlas watches them at work in the studio.