Category: today’s top story

“Laure Prouvost was the rank outsider from a particularly strong 2013 shortlist that included the higher-profile artists Tino Seghal and David Shrigley. She was awarded the £25,000 prize by the actor Saoirse Ronan at a ceremony in Derry, Northern Ireland.”

“If the future of advertising lies in the processing of nonlinguistic traits, then whoever controls the sensory infrastructure for analyzing and monetizing them–the “emotion sharing apparatus,” as Samsung calls it in one its patents –will be the successor to today’s moguls of online advertising.”

“As soon as Amazon can work out the regulations and figure out how to prevent your packages from being dropped on your head from above, Bezos promised, there will be a fleet of shipping drones taking the sky.”

“There are few publications in New York City–either extant or extinct–that do not bear at least some of his influence. Writers talk about the old Observer as if it were a sacred religious text. Under Kaplan’s tenure, the paper became nothing short of the best kept secret in New York.”

“During the meeting, the president encouraged the entertainment executives to search for common ground with the technology industry and offered the assistance of his administration to help bridge a still sizable divide between the two.”

“Radu Dogaru, 29, had admitted planning the three-minute heist of works by Picasso, Monet and Gauguin in October 2012 at the Kunsthal museum in Rotterdam, dubbed the ‘theft of the century’ in the Netherlands.” Accomplice Eugen Darie received the same sentence. Dogaru’s mother faces trial for allegedly burning three of the stolen canvases.

“If the demand for, say, live performances is enhanced by the ‘popularity’ of the artists generated from the number of distributed recordings (legal and illegal copies combined), then we obtain the conditions under which publishers of recorded media may lose for piracy, whereas artists may gain from piracy.”

“It is clear that Piano has thought deeply about the work of Kahn and created a building that echoes the earlier one rather like an old Gregorian chant line woven into a newly composed Renaissance Mass: You have to look to find the subterranean connections, and in the process of looking, there is a deep and satisfying pleasure. And as you explore the tendrils of connection, you realize how much Piano has accomplished while subtly deflecting the biggest problem of all, that the modern museum is unsure of what it wants to be and why it exists.”

“She was most eloquent in poems, illuminating the ironies and despair in a poor black woman’s daily struggle for dignity but also writing tenderly and with humor about identity, tangled love, California winters and her working-class parents.”

William Nicholson, a nominee for this year’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award for a passage from his novel Motherland, explains in an essay why he will not be a good sport about this.