“Stories seem to me to be the key to education, to social organization, to creativity, learning, consciousness, self-awareness — the whole works. I think it’s a fundamental differentiating capability of us humans. And machines don’t have it yet.”
Blog
Why Immersive Theatre Is Scarily Precarious
There’s greater insecurity to immersive work than its conventional counterpart. Often the producers have to beg landlords for use of the spaces that suits the work, such as disused flats and office buildings ripe for development.
The Science In Shakespeare
Until relatively recently, Shakespeare’s contact with the scientific world has gone largely unnoticed both among scholars and general audiences. Perhaps Shakespeare scholars and audiences don’t notice the way he takes up science because they are unfamiliar with much of the science he was exposed to, while most scientists don’t see Shakespeare as valuable for reflecting on science because they assume he was unfamiliar with it.
Research: Why People Are Skeptical Of Science
People can be skeptical or distrusting of science for different reasons, whether it is about one specific finding from one discipline (for example, ‘The climate is not warming, but I believe in evolution’), or about science in general (‘Science is just one of many opinions’). We identified four major predictors of science acceptance and science skepticism: political ideology; religiosity; morality; and knowledge about science. These variables tend to intercorrelate – in some cases quite strongly – which means that they are potentially confounded.
What Kind Of Critical Press Can You Have If Artists Hold Veto Power?
Many friends and colleagues have stories about a piece that was killed because a living artist took issue with some aspect of it. One colleague even went as far to suggest that we should edit an anthology of essays killed because of the protestations of artists. Others suggested that I should stop writing on living artists. In such a potential minefield, what possibilities remain for academic writing and criticism on the work of living artists (and deceased ones with overly involved estates) when she can register disapproval and silence our work through her curator or editor, or through the withholding of image permissions?
The Vermont Town That Has Way Too Many Organs
“In its heyday, the Estey Organ Company factory was the beating, bleating heart of Brattleboro, Vermont. It produced more than half a million organs in total and, at its peak, employed more than 500 people. On a fateful day in 1960, however, the assembly lines shut down and workers departed. After nearly a century in operation, the organ factory had gone silent. And then, like the most improbable boomerangs, the organs started coming back.”
Platforms Instead Of Corporations – Is This A Better Way To Work?
Collaboration tools are opening up space for manager-free forms of work. And contracting costs are likely to fall markedly thanks to the advent of blockchain protocols – algorithms that replace trusted third parties, and instead automatically verify transactions using a huge digital ledger, spread across multiple computers. As a result of these innovations, a new way of working is emerging: a series of interactions that are open, skills-based and software-optimised. Where once we had the ‘corporation’, instead we are witnessing the ascendancy of the ‘platform’. The question is: should we see this as a promise, or a threat?
What’s Radical About This New Translation Of The New Testament
“[David Bentley] Hart’s stated aim is to offer an ‘almost pitilessly literal translation’ that is ‘not shaped by later theological and doctrinal history’, with the intention of making ‘the familiar strange, novel, and perhaps newly compelling’. … One of his most pointed observations relates to the stark contrast between the conservative and socially compliant nature of many modern Christians and the disturbing character of the first converts … These are people, he wryly observes, whom ‘most of us would find fairly obnoxious: civically reprobate, ideologically unsound, economically destructive, politically irresponsible, socially discreditable’.”
I’m Going To Live Forever (No Really, It’s A Thing. Promise)
The latest enthusiasm for eternal life largely stems not from any acid-soaked, tie-dyed counterculture but from the belief that technology will enhance humans and make them immortal. Today’s transhumanist movement, sometimes called H+, encompasses a broad range of issues and diversity of belief, but the notion of immortality—or, more correctly, amortality—is the central tenet. Transhumanists believe that technology will inevitably eliminate aging or disease as causes of death and instead turn death into the result of an accidental or voluntary physical intervention.
When Allen Ginsberg Went Off On RFK Over Pot
When the Ginsberg showed up at Senator Kennedy’s office without an appointment, the senator heard the poet out “on everything from the plight of heroin addicts to federal drug policy to global warming to the war in Vietnam to the invention of LSD to the degraded state of New York City.” Then Ginsberg asked RFK if he had ever smoked marijuana, and Kennedy said no. Uh-oh. (And before he finally left, Ginsberg insisted on singing Kennedy the Hare Krishna mantra.)