“Having done the talk I have learned that this is the alchemy of art. Ted Talks are art masquerading as information. I was struggling to express something, not yet a fully formed articulation in my head, but I stuttered it out anyway. Then scientists and other fine humans heard it and spoke it back to me from their experience in a way that has helped me understand my life better.”
Blog
Galway Ireland’s Capital Of Culture Project Is A Mess. How Did It Happen?
With just 15 months to go until Galway becomes the official European capital of culture 2020, the only waves the project has been generating are those that occur in choppy waters.
Reality According To Google (Like It Or Not We’ve Got To Deal With It)
Whether or not Google ultimately exercises this power depends on its human leaders—and on the digital society Google is so central to building. The company is investing heavily in machine intelligence, committing itself to a highly automated future where the mechanics and, perhaps, the true insights of the quest for knowledge become difficult or impossible for humans to understand. Google is gradually becoming an extension of individual and collective thought. It will get harder to recognize where people end and Google begins. People will become both empowered by and dependent on the technology—which will be easy for anyone to access but hard for people to control.
Old Vic Theatre Works To Rebuild Post-Kevin Spacey
After an investigation, the Old Vic said it had received 20 complaints of inappropriate behavior by Spacey, who led the theater between 2004 and 2015. It said most of the alleged victims had been staff members, and acknowledged that a “cult of personality” around the Hollywood star had made it difficult for them to come forward. In response, the Old Vic trained staff members to act as “confidential sounding boards” to staff members experiencing abuse and unsure about what to do.
The Showrunner Who Makes Hits By Ignoring All Of Television’s Trends
Jennie Snyder Urman is not interested in the kind of prestige TV beats that made massive cultural hits out of everything from Breaking Bad to Game of Thrones. Nope. Her show “Jane the Virgin is anti-prestige in every way, a show about admirable women full of brilliant color, bone-rattling twists, and goofy, sly in-jokes that regularly dives into unabashed emotional sincerity.”
Radically Decorous
If decorous action is calm, staid and subdued, then people who are comfortable will inevitably find decorum a lighter burden. Meanwhile, it will weigh more heavily on those who are hurting, dispossessed and justly angry. If this basic inequity is baked into the concept, why not do away with decorum altogether?
Charles Aznavour, Master Of The Chanson, And Also Composer And Film Star, Has Died At 94
It’s nearly impossible to sum up the life of a man who toured as an international musician for almost 80 years, but here’s just a bit. “His accomplishments were prodigious: He wrote, by his own estimate, more than 1,000 songs, for himself and for others, and sang them in French, Armenian, English, German, Italian, Spanish and Yiddish. He sold well over 100 million records in his lifetime. He appeared in more than 60 films, beginning with bit parts as a child.”
Private-Label Teas Helped Women Win Suffrage In The U.S.
That’s right: Tea was part of more than one U.S. revolution. In California, it united disparate cities and rural areas. “There were women who refused to pay for their grocery bills if their grocer did not carry Equality Tea.”
Netflix Totally Misfired A Movie About Black Hair, But TV (Yes, Even Network) Delivers
It’s truly weird that Netflix can’t get it right in Nappily Ever After when shows like This Is Us and Grown-ish get it so right. Then there are the how-tos on YouTube for Issa Rae’s hair from Insecure, and the joys of Atlanta: “As they discussed child-care plans, Van took down her voluminous curls, which had been twisted into Bantu knots. It’s wasn’t the focus of the scene — and that’s precisely what made it so powerful.”
California Gets A Tough New Net Neutrality Law, And Trump’s Department Of Justice Immediately Sues To Block It
California isn’t into the new FCC rules that allow blocking or throttling of “lawful traffic. The law also bans paid data cap exemptions (so-called ‘zero-rating’), and says that ISPs may not attempt to evade net neutrality protections by slowing down traffic at network interconnection points.” Sounds good, right? Not to Jeff Sessions, of course.