What’s more, it’s for a little egg-shaped structure from Guatemala. Carolina Miranda explains.
Tag: 06.07.17
For First Time, Baileys Prize For Women’s Fiction Goes To Sci-Fi Title
“Naomi Alderman’s The Power, … set in a dystopian future where women and girls can kill men with a single touch, was the favourite on a shortlist that included former winner Linda Grant and Man Booker-shortlisted Madeleine Thien.”
How Times Square Was Reinvented
“In today’s America of drastically reduced civic expectations, Snøhetta’s quietly brilliant reconfiguration of Times Square is an exemplar of how much can be achieved in city planning without the gigantic financial outlays and dire social displacements that typified American postwar urban renewal projects.”
Bob Dylan’s Singular, Quirky Performance Of His Nobel Speech
“Dylan submitted his lecture, four thousand and eight words long, to the Swedes on June 5th. You can read it here, and listen, too; Dylan made a recording of his text, speaking for twenty-seven minutes over a smoky, meditative jazz-piano arrangement. Not for him, the sombre pomp of the podium. He sounds like a lounge singer lost in contemplative patter, just letting the thoughts flow. Pour yourself a whiskey, honey, pull up a chair, and stay awhile.”
Why Frank Lloyd Wright’s Los Angeles Houses Are Unique
He was trying to shape an indigenous regional architecture for Southern California. And he was attempting to put a definitive end to — to bury for good — a deeply troubled decade in his personal and professional lives. The regionalism of the houses, their response to the landscape, history and climate of Southern California, is at once their most powerful and most naive feature.
Rich People’s Demonstrations Of Status Are Changing – It’s No Longer Just About Conspicuous Consumption
“The democratisation of consumer goods has made them far less useful as a means of displaying status. In the face of rising social inequality, both the rich and the middle classes own fancy TVs and nice handbags. They both lease SUVs, take airplanes, and go on cruises. On the surface, the ostensible consumer objects favoured by these two groups no longer reside in two completely different universes. Given that everyone can now buy designer handbags and new cars, the rich have taken to using much more tacit signifiers of their social position.”
The Differences Between “Political” Art In Response To London And Manchester Attacks And Activist Political Art
It was different from the calls for “resistance” art we have been seeing in other Western countries because, this time, the existential threat being responded to was not part of out own culture; it was from outside. One could talk of a difference between “protest art” (aimed at Western-generated political problems) and “solidarity art” (designed to lift morale in the face of terrorism). And although the solidarity art is not a complaint directed at any particular state or policy, it nevertheless serves a uniting and inspiring function.
‘Trout Fishing In America’ – Minor Masterpiece, Silly ’60s Relic, Or Both?
“Richard Brautigan’s first novel sold less than 800 copies. His next novel sold 4 million copies. Trout Fishing in America turns 50 this year, and while most novels of that age now seem dated, Brautigan’s work seems particularly so: playful, goofy, fragmentary, optimistic. Trout Fishing in America is worth revisiting for exactly its status as an artifact of that time, a book that reveled in language, and made its writer into an imperfect legend.”
‘We Never Really Left High School At All’ – How Popularity Matters Throughout Adult Life
“Study after study … suggest[s] the ways that popularity imprints itself on people’s lives, far beyond the teenage years, through both its presence and its absence. Popularity affects people’s ability to find success in their careers, regardless of their intelligence or their work ethic. It affects their ability to find fulfilling friendships and romantic relationships. … [It’s] much like class in America: It divides people. It defines people. Yet we generally treat it as a relic of the past – as something that was, once, but that thankfully is no more.”
Researchers Are Teaching Machines How To Draw. Is This A Way To Teach Them To Think?
“For humans, a sketch is a depiction of a real thing. We can easily understand the relationship between the abstract four-line representation and the thing itself. The concept means something to us. For SketchRNN, a sketch is a sequence of pen strokes, a shape being formed through time. The task for the machine is to take the essences of things depicted in our drawings and try to use them to understand the world as it is.”