John Seabrook does a deep dive into how artificial intelligence programs learn the rules of English grammar and syntax and teach themselves how to predict what you, at the keyboard, might write next — and even, eventually, to write the way you do. Then he and a computer scientist feed a program the entire New Yorker nonfiction archive as a dataset to learn from, and they ask it to try, based on the opening, to complete a real New Yorker article. – The New Yorker
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Royal Ballet’s New Star Marcelino Sambé On How He Got Into Dance
“It was hilarious. I showed up in tracksuit and trainers, didn’t know what ballet was. The atmosphere was sterile, the other kids were preppy and well prepared. I was nothing of the kind. But I could do the splits and I remember I kept doing the splits repeatedly [he laughs].” The panel was not impressed. “Then came the special moment when they asked us just to dance. – The Guardian
Just Two Weeks After Winning A MacArthur, Walter Hood Wins Another $250,000
“The … public artist whose work ranges from sculpture to landscape design has won the annual Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, which comes with $250,000 and honors a United States-based artist ‘who has pushed the boundaries of an art form, contributed to social change, and paved the way for the next generation.'” – ARTnews
School Maintenance Worker Gets Laid Off, Writes A Hallmark Channel Christmas Movie
“At the time I wrote this, I had lost my job after 37 years with an engineering firm. They called me in on a Wednesday afternoon and said, ‘We got to let you get, a reduction in force.’ So here I was at 56, wondering what am I going to do with my life,” he said. He took a year off to write. – Chicago Tribune
Seeing ‘Slave Play’ As A Black Person, With An All-Black Audience
Aisha Harris: “At one point during the performance — as the white woman … used a black dildo on her [black] partner … while they pretended to be the mistress and slave on a plantation — my colleague, seated next to me, said, ‘Imagine seeing this with white people!’ I could absolutely imagine it, and thus understood why this specially curated audience needed to exist.” – The New York Times
Major Public Art Project Honors Black Lives In One Of America’s Most Important Black Neighborhoods
“Njaimeh Njie, a Pittsburgh-based artist who works primarily with print and photography, set out on a journey in 2016 to document black lives in her city, focusing on the Hill District, the historic black neighborhood that serves as the home base for some of the world’s most pioneering musicians and August Wilson’s 10-play theatrical universe.” – CityLab
African Women Authors Make Historical Fiction Their Own
“African historical fiction is far from a new genre – is there a more globally known work of African fiction, after all, than Chinua Achebe’s 1958 classic story of Nigeria at the moment of British colonization, Things Fall Apart? But in recent years, the genre has been reinvented by a new generation of African writers. And this time around, most of them are women.” – The Christian Science Monitor
Artist Matthew Wong, Innovative Painter Of Landscapes, Dead By Suicide At 35
“With just three solo shows and a handful of star turns in group exhibitions, Wong established himself as a quicksilver talent, with an almost preternatural sense for creating gripping, idiosyncratic scenes, which he sometimes populated with a solitary figure (or merely a trace of one).” – ARTnews
Who Will Replace Plácido Domingo At Los Angeles Opera? No One
The company has decided to eliminate the title of General Director and fold its duties in with those of the President and CEO, Christopher Koelsch. – Los Angeles Times
New York Mag/Vulture Theater Critic Sara Holdren Steps Down
“I’m stepping away from full-time criticism to pursue more directing, but there’s no disentangling the two pursuits for me now. … Critic and director must both articulate a vision and relate it to the wider world. Both are authors, whether of an argument or an event. Both must contextualize; both must reveal themselves in the work; both must dream the future of the form they love. I’m off now to a different kind of dreaming.” (ninth paragraph) – Vulture