Times Literary Supplement (June 19, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Booking A Holiday’ – TLS critics choose their summer reading; Artistic license – The relationship between ‘loveliness and lucre’; Christopher Isherwood in full; How to be a Liberal; Story of a ghost painter and Fine-art fraud…
Before and after artificial intelligence
We will never know how many died during the Butlerian Jihad. Was it millions? Billions? Trillions, perhaps? It was a fantastic rage, a great revolt that spread like wildfire, consuming everything in its path, a chaos that engulfed generations in an orgy of destruction lasting almost a hundred years. A war with a death toll so high that it left a permanent scar on humanity’s soul. But we will never know the names of those who fought and died in it, or the immense suffering and destruction it caused, because the Butlerian Jihad, abominable and devastating as it was,…
Can AI think creatively? Can we?
“Far as the east from even, / Dim as the border star, / Life is the little creature / That carries the great cigar.” So wrote Emily Dickinson, with some unfortunate help from a computer. As I read that stanza in February 2022, I was more than six months into a scientific experiment I was conducting with my friend and colleague Morten Christiansen, a cognitive psychologist at Cornell, where he and I are professors. In 2021, two years before ChatGPT would become a household name, Christiansen had been impressed by the initial technical descriptions of GPT-3, the recently released version of the generative large language…
Nanotechnology can already puncture cancer cells and drug-resistant bacteria. What will it do next?
By Dhruv Khullar
The rise of the far right in Europe might help Americans deprovincialize their own crisis. The single wave has struck many coastlines.
By Adam Gopnik
The eminent editor’s wife and daughter sift through a lifetime’s worth of collectibles: quirky plastic purses, a porcelain Miss Piggy, and many, many books.
By Zach Helfand
Models and forecasts can be seductive, but it’s time for executives to reclaim their economic judgment.
Forget disruption and incrementalism. Here’s how to develop high-growth products in slow-growth companies.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (June 14, 2024): The latest issue features…
They’ve been linked to reproductive disorders and cancers. Why are they still being marketed so aggressively to Black women?
She first noticed the scent on her husband. Now her abilities are helping unlock new research in early disease detection.
At some point in almost every performance she gives, Julia Louis-Dreyfus has this look. If you’ve watched “Seinfeld,” “The New Adventures of Old Christine” or “Veep,” you know it — the perfect mix of irritation and defiance. As if she were saying, Try me.
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Despite failing hardware, NASA has no plans to pursue a servicing mission to the aging, iconic instrument
New studies include health data collected from space tourists on first privately funded orbital mission
Ancient DNA shows continuity between living and ancient Maya communities
HARVARD MAGAZINE July/August 2024 :
Project CETI’s pioneering effort to unlock the language of sperm whales
by Jonathan Shaw
Reflections on six decades of relations with comptuers
by Harry R. Lewis
The Guardian Weekly (June 13, 2024) – The new issue features ‘Blood Lines’ – The human cost of Europe’s cocaine habit’; The Far Rights surges across EU; A doughnut theory of the universe; The muscular rise of steroids…
In a week when much of the attention in Europe was on far-right political gains in the parliamentary elections, the Guardian Weekly’s cover shines a light on another of the continent’s disturbing undercurrents.
A Guardian investigation has found that hundreds of unaccompanied child migrants across Europe are being forced to work for increasingly powerful drug cartels to meet the continent’s soaring appetite for cocaine.
In cities including Paris and Brussels, gangs are exploiting the “unlimited” supply of vulnerable African children at their disposal, using brutal means to control their victims, including torture and rape if they fail to sell enough drugs, as they seek to expand Europe’s $13bn cocaine market.
Mark Townsend reveals the plight of the illegal trade’s child foot soldiers, while Annie Kelly explains the growing problem of cocaine use in Europe. And from Ecuador, Tom Phillips reports on how death and destruction follow the drug on its complex journey across the Atlantic.
If America wants to maintain its lead, it should focus less on keeping China down
Elsewhere, political dysfunction and fiscal frailties are taking a toll
Times Literary Supplement (June 13, 2024): The latest issue features Freud’s Discontents – George Prochnik on the father of psychology; A great novel on the American Frontier; Death becomes them – The mourning rituals of the Victorians; Cover-up – An atrocity committed by US troops in the Philippines….
