Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. Hemingway’s Cat in the Rain. Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie. “Fairies hid copies of these books and more in public places this past weekend as a local launch of The Book Fairies project, an international initiative in which people leave texts for others to discover in cities around the world. After readers finish a book, they are supposed to pass it on to others.”
Tag: 08.09.17
This May Be The Most Excruciating Celebrity Profile Of All Time
In which Robert Pattinson tries extremely, breathtakingly hard to get through an interview without revealing anything (except about dealing with paparazzi).
Lost Giacometti Sketches Turn Up In Antiques Shop
The pencil drawings were among the effects of the famously crusty London dealer Eila Grahame, who died in 2010.
Show Closes In San Francisco After Theatre Makes Unauthorized Cuts
“Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis has revoked the rights to the Shelton Theater’s production of his “The Last Days of Judas Iscariot,” citing the show’s script cuts, which violate federal copyright law, as well as the theater’s response after he found out about the cuts.”
When Artificial Intelligence Software Comes Out Even Stupider Than Its Creators Had Hoped
Reporter Jacob Brogan talks with researcher Janelle Shane – who created a neural network to tell knock-knock jokes, only to have it become fixated on the Cow With No Lips joke – about “what’s going on under the hood, what her creations might teach us, and why it’s so funny when neural networks go bad.”
What Happened To The Moral Outrage That Was Such A Mainstay Of Standup Comedy?
Well, perhaps most of it wasn’t funny enough, argues James Kettle – and when we see it these days, as with John Oliver, it tends to be cooler and more wry and less, well, outraged than in the ’80s.
German Now Officially Has 5,000 New Words, Many Of Them English (Which Irks Some Germans)
Among the new items in the authoritative Duden dictionary: Selfie, postfaktisch (post-truth), Emoji, Cyberkrieg (cyber-war), and tindern (to do online dating).
Robotics Companies Are Hiring People From Animation Firms To Make Their Machines Cuter
“They’re taking cues from some of fiction’s friendlier robots – think the droids in Star Wars, or Wall-E – and blending it with the latest thinking on how our own brains work to create real-life robots that may make us more inclined to accept these technologies into our lives…. This cottage industry of bot-makers are concerned with what the machines look like, how they sound, and what kind of personalities they have.”
Why Are So Many Of Today’s Pop Singers Having To Have Surgery On Their Vocal Cords?
There is no precise data on the number of performers who have gone under the knife over the years. But several surgeons told me they estimate that vocal cord surgery has been performed on thousands of pop, rock and classical singers, as well as on theatre and stage musical stars.
Why Have So Many Music Festivals Gotten Into Trouble This Year?
“Between the councils, organisers, security and ticket companies, it’s often hard to know who was actually at fault, and although it might seem reductive to see individuals to blame for large-scale disasters like Hope & Glory, it might be not too far from the truth.”