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UK Publishers, Booksellers Wrestle With Selling Right Wing Books

With a divisive election looming and rising rates of hate crime, the question of how best to engage with opposing views is, says David Shelley of the publishing giant Hachette, hotly debated in acquisitions meetings. “It’s important to uphold free speech, but social justice is also a big part of our mission,” he says. He is proud that Hachette publishes authors from across the political spectrum, from Labour’s Jess Phillips to the controversial rightwing commentator Rod Liddle. “But we wouldn’t want to publish any book that played a part in oppressing minorities, or went against our inclusive ethos.” – The Guardian

Machines Become More Creative When They’re Allowed To Wander

Because of biology’s track record, Kenneth Stanley and others have come to believe that if we want algorithms that can navigate the physical and social world as easily as we can — or better! — we need to imitate nature’s tactics. Instead of hard-coding the rules of reasoning, or having computers learn to score highly on specific performance metrics, they argue, we must let a population of solutions blossom. Make them prioritize novelty or interestingness instead of the ability to walk or talk. They may discover an indirect path, a set of steppingstones, and wind up walking and talking better than if they’d sought those skills directly. – Quanta

Last Year Archaeologists Dated Cave Paintings In Spain Back To The Neanderthals. Were They Wrong?

Published in the Journal of Human Evolution, the critique, led by New York University archaeologist Randall White and co-authored by 44 international researchers, suggests that the dating technique used in the earlier report might not be reliable. “There is still no convincing archaeological evidence that Neanderthals created [southwestern European] cave art,” the document states. – Artnet

Discriminatingly Nondiscriminatory: MoMA Expands the Canon (But Leaves Out Native Americans)

Given the emphasis on increased diversity of representation for artists featured in the permanent collection — female artists, in particular, are more abundantly represented in the current hang and stand up to comparison with their more renowned male colleagues, and two special exhibitions reflect the museum’s increased attention to African-American artists — the apparent failure to include Native Americans in the new MoMA’s inaugural displays is beyond comprehension. – Lee Rosenbaum