Category: words

“The four-building, 19-acre ‘working center for citizenship,’ set to be built in a public park on the South Side of Chicago, will include a 235-foot-high ‘museum tower,’ a two-story event space, an athletic center, a recording studio, a winter garden, even a sledding hill. … In a break with precedent, there will be no research library on site, and none of Mr. Obama’s official presidential records,” which are to be digitized and posted online. – The New York Times

“Bill Henderson, founder of the Pushcart Press and the Pushcart Prize, has teamed up with novelist Jonathan Lethem to start Lethem’s Legends, a series that will reprint selected out-of-print works. The first title in the series, which Lethem will edit, is Bad Guy by Rosalyn Drexler, the visual artist, playwright, and novelist.” – Publishers Weekly

“Google employees have previously acknowledged that Wittgenstein’s theories gave them a breakthrough in making their translation services more effective, but somehow, this key connection between philosophy of language and artificial intelligence has long gone under-celebrated and overlooked.” Here’s an explanation. – Quartz

These objects can fill in gaps in the written record, revealing new aspects of historical production and trade. How much beeswax came from North Africa, for example? Or how did cattle plague make its way through Europe? With ample genetic data, you might reconstruct a more complete picture of life hundreds of years in the past. – The Atlantic

Writing is so influenced by the machines we write with. The process of creating something is shaped by the tools. Ergo, what we write is also shaped? And how about readers? With constant demands on their attention, with screens and email and notifications, the process of reading has changed. What’s a writer to do? – The New Yorker

“‘Spain’ and ‘September 1, 1939’ would be variously revised and amended before Auden finally excised them altogether from his corpus, the first because he saw it as the endorsement of a wicked philosophy, the second because it saw it as sententious nonsense.” – The Daily Beast

These excellent results have freaked the researchers out. One concern they have is that the technology would be used to turbo-charge fake news operations. The Guardian published a fake news article written by the software along with its coverage of the research. The article is readable and contains fake quotes that are on topic and realistic. The grammar is better than a lot what you’d see from fake news content mills. And according to The Guardian’s Alex Hern, it only took 15 seconds for the bot to write the article.  – Gizmodo

James, who is originally Jamaican and who lives in Minnesota, says of his African fantasy epic, “I was reading a lot of the original myths and legends. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to write a fantasy novel. I wanted the ability to pick and choose and do what Tolkien did with Scandinavian and British culture. I wanted this pool of ideas and legends and building something out of it.” – The Observer (UK)

“Given the amount of time a modern human being spends watching film and television, a little familiarity with the form doesn’t seem like a bad thing.” So, here are all of the links. – Slate