Kwame Anthony Appiah: “Like all the words in our language, the identity labels we use are a common possession. Were everybody to follow Humpty Dumpty’s example [‘When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean’], we simply couldn’t understand one another. If Toni Morrison isn’t a black woman, the term isn’t doing any work. … ‘Lesbian’ isn’t much use if you’re looking for a partner on Bumble unless it signifies a woman who might be open to sex with another woman.”
Tag: 08.31.18
A New Advancement In AI: It Remembers What It Has Learned
In short, the algorithm is able to note differences between what it encounters and what it has seen in the past. Like most people but unlike most other algorithms, the new system Higgins built for Google can understand that it hasn’t come across a brand new object just because it’s seeing something from a new angle.
Berlin Train Station Gives Up Plan To Use Atonal Music To Drive Away Undesirables
Last month, Germany’s national rail operator announced that it would start broadcasting atonal music from the speakers at Berlin’s Hermannstrasse station in order to repel drug dealers and homeless people who were congregating there. The city’s new-music community rose up in protest. Lisa Benjes of the Initiative Neue Musik writes about how she organized a concert of atonal music at the station that convinced the powers-that-be to abandon that plan.
In China, Some Sold-Out Hit Movies Are Really Seen By Very Few People
Many investors reportedly put money into films as a stock-market manipulation scheme, buying up blocks of unsold tickets and even entire screenings so that the perception of success will push up a company’s share price. Film production is also used as a way to evade capital-flight controls and transfer large sums of money out of the country.
Paul Taylor, R.I.P.
I wrote an appreciation of Paul Taylor for the online edition of today’s Wall Street Journal. Here’s an excerpt. * * * Paul Taylor, who died on Wednesday at the age of 88, was…
I Hate Burritos
So the headline isn’t mine, it came as a demand from my longtime eating partner Shelley, who heard me complain yet again about one of her beloveds — this particular paragon presenting as fat, limp,
Reading With Aimee Mann
LAST week I took a wild guess and approached singer/songwriter Aimee Mann for my musicians-on-writing column, All the Poets. As a longtime fan I had a vague sense that she was literary.
How The Online Global Gig Economy Threatens Us All
While freelance websites may have raised wages and broadened the number of potential employers for some people, they’ve forced every new worker who signs up into entering a global marketplace with endless competition, low wages, and little stability. Decades ago, the only companies that outsourced work overseas were multinational corporations with the resources to set up manufacturing shops elsewhere. Now, independent businesses and individuals are using the power of the internet to find the cheapest services in the world too, and it’s not just manufacturing workers who are seeing the downsides to globalization. All over the country, people like graphic designers and voice-over artists and writers and marketers have to keep lowering their rates to compete.
End Of An Era: The Village Voice Is No More
Three years after buying The Village Voice, and a year after the paper shut down its print edition, owner Peter Barbey told the remaining staff today that the publication will no longer be posting any new stories.
Can This Playwright Make Snooker Into Compelling Theatre?
The question seems even more unlikely when one finds out that the play in question is titled The Nap. But the playwright is Richard Bean, who gave us One Man, Two Guvnors. As he tells Roslyn Sulcas, “[Snooker] is sociologically quite interesting, because it’s a working-class game. You read the autobiographies of the top players, the tropes are exactly the same: alcohol, gambling, fast cars, women trouble, dystopian families. That’s your raw material really. At the same time it’s unbelievably difficult, and it’s like playing first violin in the Philharmonic.”