“The festival has swelled to an untameable 2,871 shows, most of them well-behaved and aspiring. It’s time, some say, for a fringe of the Fringe.”
Tag: 08.17.13
Does Using GPS Kill Our Sense Of Direction?
“When we use GPS, the research indicates, we remember less about the places we go, and put less work into generating our own internal picture of the world. Often referred to as mental maps, these schematics tell us where things are in relation to each other and allow us to navigate among them.”
The Deep Learning That Will Revolutionize How Our Computers Think
“Google silently did something revolutionary on Thursday. It open sourced a tool called word2vec, prepackaged deep-learning software designed to understand the relationships between words with no human guidance. Just input a textual data set and let underlying predictive models get to work learning.”
Dramatically Altering The Way Women Sound, In Hollywood And Beyond
“Our heroine transformed into an It Girl, demonstrating vocal exercises on Conan and doing an interview for The New Yorker in a sauna. Along the way, she’s inspiring a generation of women to stop talking like sexy babies, and raising the percentage of films directed by women a few precious points.”
What’s It Like Writing A Memoir When You’re Almost 90 And You’ve Broken Your Back?
“Five years ago, the [then 85-year-old] author Emma Smith decided she wasn’t going to write any more.” But then she got taken out to lunch … and persuaded.
How Bloomberg Shaped New York (For Good, Bad, And More)
Want to see how much Bloomberg’s policies reshaped the city during his tenure as mayor? This interactive shows and tells about new buildings, bike lanes, gentrification – and more.
When One Country Drops A Traditional Dance, Can Another Just Pick It Up?
The dance is mostly forgotten in Cuba, but “growing numbers of children and young Mexicans flock to festivals and join classes to learn the elegant steps and dress up in the flamboyant costumes of danzón.”
An Attempt To Gentrify Without Pushing Out The Neighborhood’s People
“All over this city, people create these completely artificial spaces and call them communities, but we’ve had that here for the last 100 years.”
Could Joyce Kilmer’s ‘Trees’ Poem Please Just Die In A Fire?
But “Trees” isn’t even the worst of it. “Most of [Kilmer’s] efforts fairly drip with piety, even when the subject is as mundane as New Jersey mass transit.”
Sorry, We Know It’s Overkill, But Here’s One More Story On Jeff Bezos
We just can’t look away from this guy who took away free aspirin from his employees and has, um, had an impact on bookstores and now owns the Washington Post.