For the last few months I’ve been meaning to revisit some of the abiding concerns of this blog and the book that inspired it. Mostly, I’m talking about what we used to call the press …
Blog
On the far side
Mrs. T and I are putting our lives back together after her unexpected hospital stay. It’s taken some doing.
A New Advancement In AI: It Remembers What It Has Learned
In short, the algorithm is able to note differences between what it encounters and what it has seen in the past. Like most people but unlike most other algorithms, the new system Higgins built for Google can understand that it hasn’t come across a brand new object just because it’s seeing something from a new angle.
Van Gogh Museum Sends High-Quality Reproductions On Tour Of U.S. Shopping Malls
It’s a straightforward outreach program to connect with people who may rarely or never visit a museum, let alone Amsterdam. But the reproductions are made with a new process the museum calls “reliefography” – and (this is in a mall, after all) some of them are available for purchase.
TV Seeks Diverse Writers But Is Having Trouble Finding Enough
“In more than three dozen interviews, writers, producers, and studio and network executives said heightened scrutiny in the wake of #OscarsSoWhite and other controversies has led to the concerted push, particularly for women of color in senior positions. … [But relatively few are in the supply chain. It is a problem of Hollywood’s own making.”
AO Scott: How Reviewing Movies Has Changed
“It still matters to my colleagues and me that we experience a film in aesthetically optimal conditions — projected on a big screen in a dark room with no distractions — even if many of our readers will end up watching at home.”
Maybe Literature Really Is Dead
If so, then modern technology is not the murderer, writes David Ulin. After all, when books had their greatest power and influence (he cites Thomas Paine’s Common Sense as an example), mass-market printing was cutting-edge technology. That’s not to say that today’s technology isn’t involved in the death, though.
In Defense Of Connoisseurship
This, then, is a familiar distinction, the contrast between scrutiny of art’s social background and the connoisseur’s concern with artworks’ visual qualities. In principle, perhaps these two approaches are complimentary. But in practice, they seem to come into conflict.
Berlin Train Station Gives Up Plan To Use Atonal Music To Drive Away Undesirables
Last month, Germany’s national rail operator announced that it would start broadcasting atonal music from the speakers at Berlin’s Hermannstrasse station in order to repel drug dealers and homeless people who were congregating there. The city’s new-music community rose up in protest. Lisa Benjes of the Initiative Neue Musik writes about how she organized a concert of atonal music at the station that convinced the powers-that-be to abandon that plan.
As New Stories Get Told On Stage, New Forms For Them Challenge Ideas Of ‘Good’ Theatre
Lyn Gardner, in a post-Edinburgh column, considers plays that “have a fractured messiness that upends some of the traditional ways we tell stories on stage. … We need to recognise that what might once have been considered failings are in fact their strength. It is theatre that is as much about disrupting the traditional form as telling stories about women that are different from those traditionally told, if they have been told at all.”