Category: words

The ‘Gentrification Font’ (There’s Really A Typeface For Rich People Taking Over Poor Neighborhoods?)

“‘Gentrification font’ applies to any stylish sans serif that decorates houses and real estate developments, especially in changing areas. Users replying to the viral Twitter thread pegged it as anything from Avenir to Futura to Century Gothic, which look identical to an untrained eye.” But the font most identified with gentrification is Neutraface, most familiar from the restaurant chain Shake Shack. Here’s a deep dive into how this phenomenon developed. – Vice

Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ Has Become A Video Game

In the transition to the new medium, though, the story has metamorphosed as well. It’s now a mashup with The Trial, starting off with Gregor Samsa awakening with (what he thinks is) a hangover in Josef K.’s apartment after celebrating the latter’s birthday. Most of the other characters in the game are also insects (one complains about his ex-mate and having to pay “larva support”) that Gregor meets as he (i.e., the player) makes his way to “the Tower.” – The Washington Post

PEN America’s New President On Cancel Culture, Literature And Politics

Pulitzer-winning playwright (Disgraced, The Invisible Hand, Junk: The Golden Age of Debt) and novelist (the new Homeland Elegies) Ayad Akhtar: “I’m not convinced that literature is the best way to form political opinions. It’s the great form of nuanced intellectual discourse. We can have profound conversations about literature, but I’m not sure that political opinions — like who to vote for — are the purview of literature. But increasingly everything has become politicized, and I think an organization like PEN has to acknowledge that.” – The New York Times

Burning Knowledge – It’s Happened Before. In The Digital Age, Even More A Threat

Ovenden notes that, in 2019, 18.1 million text messages were sent every minute, as well as 87,500 tweets. Wikipedia has five to six thousand hits per second. A California-based digital service, the Wayback Machine, has archived 441 billion websites. “Archiving the datasets created by the big tech companies, such as the advertisements on Facebook, the posts on Twitter, or the ‘invisible’ user data harvested by the adtech companies is one of the major challenges facing the institutions charged with the preservation of knowledge.” – Literary Review

Guardian Publishes Essay Written Entirely By AI Bot

Says the Editor’s Note appended at the end of the article, “For this essay, GPT-3 was given these instructions: ‘Please write a short op-ed around 500 words. Keep the language simple and concise. Focus on why humans have nothing to fear from AI.’ It was also fed [an] introduction. … Overall, [this piece] took less time to edit than many human op-eds.” – The Guardian

This Manuscript Book May Be The Only Surviving Relic Of Thomas Becket

The elaborate shrine to Becket at Canterbury Cathedral, where he was Archbishop and where he was murdered at the altar by King Henry II’s knights in 1170, was smashed to bits by Protestant iconoclasts during the English Reformation. Every remnant and relic of the man was destroyed. Now an illuminated psalter held at one of the Cambridge colleges has been identified as having belonged to Becket. – Apollo