As the year draws to a close, some of us like to look forward, and some of us backward—and some way backward.
https://lithub.com/here-are-the-biggest-fiction-bestsellers-of-the-last-100-years/
It is possible, according to many sources, to become invisible, but you must be patient, methodical, and willing to eat almost anything.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/13/sight-unseen-critic-at-large-kathryn-schulz
Ricky Jay, who is perhaps the most gifted sleight-of-hand artist alive, was performing magic with a deck of cards. Also present was a friend of Mamet and Mosher’s named Christ Nogulich, the director of food and beverage at the hotel.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1993/04/05/secrets-of-the-magus
An American Marriage By Tayari Jones. $26.95. Algonquin. Fiction. Roy and Celestial are a young black couple in Atlanta “on the come up,” as he puts it, when he’s convicted of a rape he did not commit and sentenced to 12 years in prison.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/19/books/review/100-notable-books.html
Amazon has everything it needs to make massively popular algorithm-driven fiction
Amazon is the Voldemort of book events—”our friends in Seattle,” the ominous euphemism goes. The Seattle-based company is famous and feared for its dual qualities of relentlessness and opacity.
Science suggests we’re hardwired to delude ourselves. Can we do anything about it? I am staring at a photograph of myself that shows me 20 years older than I am now. I have not stepped into the twilight zone.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/09/cognitive-bias/565775/
[Essay] Known Unknowns | New Dark Age by James Bridle | Harper’s Magazine
This cautionary tale, repeated often in the academic literature on machine learning, is probably apocryphal, but it illustrates an important question about artificial intelligence: What can we know about what a machine knows? Whatever artificial intelligence might come to be, it will be fundamentally different from us, and ultimately inscrutable. Despite increasingly sophisticated systems of computation and visualization, we do not truly understand how machine learning does what it does; we can only adjudicate the results.
His views aren’t as confused as they seem. In fact, they’re remarkably consistent—and they have a long history. One of the most common misconceptions about Donald Trump is that he is opportunistic and makes up his views as he goes along.
In 2011, the Dutch industrial giant Philips unveiled something it called the Microbial Home.
Authenticity is real. It is a repair process within the order of symbols, within the hyperreal, in which efforts to destroy the order of symbols are channeled into acts that strengthen and expand it. What is authenticity? Once upon a time things seemed pretty real.
