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.”
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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.
Recording Academy, To Address Diversity Problem, Adds 900 Members To Pool Of Grammy Voters
“Invites were extended to a broad range of music creators, including vocalists, songwriters, instrumentalists, producers and engineers. All 900 invitees, who were pre-qualified to vote by the Recording Academy, are female and/or people of color and/or under 39.”
Philadelphia Theatre Company Makes High-Stakes Return From (Semi-)Hiatus
After years of money troubles and more than one near-collapse, the city’s flagship non-profit stage company recruited a new producing artistic director and then took 16 months off, presenting only a few imported events. Now that new boss, Paige Price, has gotten the outstanding $1 million in debt paid off and rearranged operations, and next week PTC returns to main-stage productions with Lynn Nottage’s Sweat. Will the audience return? And what comes afterward?
This Woman Is Trying To Make Arles The Cultural Capital Of The South Of France
With a $175 million arts complex called Luma Arles, Maja Hoffmann (an heir to the Hoffmann-La Roche pharmaceuticals fortune) “is trying to transform [the city of 35,000] through art, much in the same way that the artist Donald Judd reimagined a town called Marfa in Texas, or the Dia Art Foundation rebuilt the upstate New York town of Beacon, using art as a draw and an economic engine.” (Not to mention, of course, Bilbao — and, of course, the architect of Luma Arles is Frank Gehry.) “In doing so, Ms. Hoffmann has taken on a role that was once reserved for public officials and city planners: imagining the future and then building it.”