“You’ve heard of actors getting typecast. But there is no group more slighted, more narrowly cast, than the Muslim-American actors who earn virtually their entire livings pretending to hijack planes and slaughter infidels. Jon Ronson embarks on a soul-searching odyssey with the bad guys of Homeland, American Sniper, 24, and every other TV show and movie in which the holy warriors get mowed down before they even get to finish one good ‘Allahu Akbar!’“
Tag: 07.27.15
Mind-Bending: The Psychology Of Awe
“Awe is not an everyday emotion. You don’t wake up awestruck. A satisfying lunch doesn’t leave you filled with awe. Even a great day is unlikely to leave you in a state of jaw-dropped, consciousness-opening fear and trembling. Perhaps that’s why, up until about ten years ago, psychology had surprisingly little to say about awe.” So Jonathan Haidt and Dacher Keltner set out to change that.
The Composer That Lyric Opera Of Chicago Found On YouTube
The company was looking to commission an adaptation of Ann Patchett’s novel Bel Canto. Jimmy López remembers getting a call about it from his friend, conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya: “November 18th, 2010, I was having lunch and I got a call from Miguel. He said, ‘You need to go home and upload your vocal music to YouTube.'”
Is The Next Bolaño A Middle-Class Brazilian Housewife Who Died Almost 40 Years Ago?
“No one converts the uninitiated into devout believers as suddenly and as vertiginously as Clarice Lispector, the Latin American visionary, Ukrainian-Jewish mystic, and middle-class housewife and mother so revered by her Brazilian fans … She writes like a medieval saint who time-traveled to a high-rise apartment building in Rio and took up chain-smoking and visiting fortune-tellers.”
What’s The Job Of Philosophy? To Make You Happy? Or…
“It is an oft-repeated idea that philosophy in its modern, professional form has become detached from what was, in ancient times, a founding ideal: to teach people how to live well. In today’s university, the emphasis is on the search for the truth about whichever subject lies at hand, regardless of how, if at all, such truths change what you do when you leave the classroom. So while students often report finding philosophy “therapeutic,” they do so in passing, somewhat guiltily.”
Is Silicon Valley’s Creativity In Danger Of Stunting Itself?
“The enormous, disruptive creativity of Silicon Valley is unlike anything since the genius of the great 19th-century inventors. Its triumph is to be celebrated. But the accumulation of so much wealth so fast comes with risks. The 1990s saw a financial bubble that ended in a spectacular bust. This time the danger is insularity. The geeks live in a bubble that seals off their empire from the world they are doing so much to change.”
Study: Link Between Ideas and Creativity
“How do you make the leap from a hazy notion to one that is spelled out in practical details? Newly published research points to one simple technique that may do the trick.”
Scientists Are Teaching A Computer How To Improvise Jazz
“Jazz musician and computer scientist Kelland Thomas is building an AI program that can learn to play jazz and jam with the best of them, under a DARPA-funded project that aims to improve how we communicate with computers.”
Now Watson Will Do More Than Humiliate You At ‘Jeopardy!’ – It Will Analyze Your Writing Style
IBM is now licensing a tool of its supercomputer “cognitive system” called Tone Analyzer, which “us[es] linguistic analysis to detect emotional tones, social propensities, and writing styles” and then provides “suggestions to help the writer improve their intended language tones.”
First-Ever Nude Public Performance Art Festival Is Coming (In Switzerland, No Less)
Founder Thomas Zollinger: “The Body and Freedom Festival … aims to explore the possibilities of the naked body in urban space and everyday situational life, thereby contributing to its establishment in this context as an instrument of art expression.”