Skip to main content

November 07, 2017

From The New York Times (Karl Ove Knausgaard on "What’s the last great book you read?"):
“Pond,” by Claire-Louise Bennett.

From The New York Times (Karl Ove Knausgaard on "Who are your favorite Norwegian writers?"):
Tarjei Vesaas has written the best Norwegian novel ever, “The Birds” — it is absolutely wonderful, the prose is so simple and so subtle, and the story is so moving that it would have been counted amongst the great classics from the last century if it had been written in one of the major languages.

From Harper's:
A.I. researchers predicted that the last human job to be replaced by machines will be that of A.I. researcher.

From The Economist:
[Affairs] can sometimes even fortify relationships, so long as they spur a couple to discuss what has long been left unsaid.

From Harper's (Rebecca Solnit on the definition of the present):
The present is by common definition the instant between the not yet and the already, a moment as narrow and treacherous as a tightrope. But you might instead define it as all that is remembered by those who are currently alive. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

January 16, 2018

From  CEPR Discussion Paper : Creativity is often highly concentrated in time and space, and across different domains. What explains the formation and decay of clusters of creativity? In this paper we match data on thousands of notable individuals born in Europe between the XIth and the XIXth century with historical data on city institutions and population. After documenting several stylized facts, we show that the formation of creative clusters is not preceded by increases in city size. Instead, the emergence of city institutions protecting economic and political freedoms facilitates the attraction and production of creative talent. From Harper's : Business researchers posited that busyness has replaced leisure as a marker of prestige for Americans, constituting “an alternative kind of conspicuous consumption that operates by shifting the focus from the preciousness and scarcity of goods to the preciousness and scarcity of individuals.” From Harper's : Among Germans,...

January 02, 2018

From Harper's : Racists in the United States support free-speech rights for racist speech, but not for speech critical of their co-workers or the police. From The Economist : Affluent parents intensively nurture their children for success; the offspring of less fortunate homes fall far behind before they ever set foot in a school. From The Economist : Helpfully, some European countries have begun to offer civil unions for heterosexuals. (Gay couples already had that option.) They confer nearly all the rights of marriage but entail less of the intimidating hoopla. These now account for a fifth of new formal unions in the Netherlands, and more in some working-class districts. They have not undermined marriage so far. It is a small fix for a huge problem, but it might help. From The Guardian (John Banville on "The book that changed my life/the world"): The Catechism of the Catholic Church. It had all the answers; it told you what simony is, and why you will go...

February 05, 2018

From The Economist : Older generations have been complaining about the state of young people’s writing since a teacher of Sumerian complained about his charges 4,000 years ago. (“A junior scribe...does not pay attention to the scribal art.”) From The Economist : [Two] letters can add up to a lot of money. No area of technology is hotter than AI, or artificial intelligence. Venture-capital investment in AI in the first nine months of 2017 totalled $7.6bn, according to PitchBook, a data provider; that compares with full-year figures of $5.4bn in 2016. In the year to date there have been $21.3bn in AI-related M&A deals, around 26 times more than in 2015. In earnings calls public companies now mention AI far more often than “big data”. From The New York Times : As the longevity entrepreneur Arram Sabeti told The New Yorker: “The proposition that we can live forever is obvious. It doesn’t violate the laws of physics, so we can achieve it.” Of all the slightly creepy aspects to...