Curating The Week
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Curating the Week: Jack Dejohnette, AI and the Sublime, AI and Cognition, Apple TextEdit, Writing as Thinking
• A tribute to Jack DeJohnette. “The idea of improvisation is tied up in the very nature of our existence. We don’t expect our life to evolve without changing and we never know what’s round the corner – why should music be any different?” • An essay on AI and the sublime. “Sublimity isn’t an… Continue reading
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Curating The Week: Democratic Degradation, CLA Coaching, Iterating Towards Complexity, Brian Eno, Aesthetic Lines
“The president is brilliantly weaponizing the animosity cultivated in the electorate over the past 40 years, using it as a pretext to justify his attacks on his perceived enemies. While political violence and polarization remain serious concerns, our primary focus must shift to countering the deliberate democratic degradation unfolding before us. The conflict is no… Continue reading
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Curating The Week: Essay Writing, Zombie Democracy, Alva Noto, AI as Magical Thinking
• An essay by Zadie Smith about writing essays. “I developed a different sense of what an essay could be. I understood all three men to be ‘personal essayists’ in the sense that they cared passionately about their subjects, but they themselves were rarely figures in any particular piece; their energies were directed elsewhere. And… Continue reading
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Curating The Week: Awe, Brian Eno’s Legacy, Daily Rhythms
• An essay on awe. “Unlike the dark passions, awe is a pro-social emotion. It can encourage attitudes of generosity and altruism; of selflessness, empathy, and compassion. The sense that we are part of something vast and meaningful can create bonds of connection.” • An essay on Brian Eno’s legacy. “It’s possible, today, to go… Continue reading
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Curating The Week: Running, Terry Riley, Wisdom, A.I.
• A video (with music) about running. • An essay on Terry Riley. “I felt like a transcendentalist, an illusionist, or a magician. Something that has to do with magic. I feel it’s my field to create magic in sound. Magic in the sense of transcendence of this ordinary life into another realm. An awakening,… Continue reading
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Curating The Week: Margaret Boden, Brainstorming With AI, Attention, B-Sections
• Margaret Boden’s obituary. “Computer science, she went on, helps us ‘to understand what a generative system is, how it’s possible to have a set of rules — which may be a very, very short, briefly statable set of rules — but which has the potential to generate infinitely many different structures.’” • A scholar… Continue reading
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Curating The Week: Jaron Lanier On Musical Instruments, Spotify, Adam Gopnik On The Renaissance
• An interview with Jaron Lanier about musical instruments. “To me, musical instruments are the best user interfaces that have ever been invented. If what you think a technology is for is to help a person affect the world with ever greater acuity, then musical instruments are the most advanced technologies that have ever existed.”… Continue reading
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Curating The Week: Fake AI Bands, AI’s Effects on Writing and Reading
• An article on fake AI bands. “The internet has fragmented and flattened subcultures. The Velvet Sundown’s puppeteers present the band’s soft pastiche of genres—psychedelic, folk, indie—as sophisticated fusion, but of course it’s nothing more than a careless smear of stylistic averages. Psychedelic, folk, and indie rock each in their own way have something to… Continue reading
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Curating The Week: The Essay Field, AI and Cooking, Measuring Training
“The impact of an essay is how much it changes readers’ thinking multiplied by the importance of the topic. But it’s hard to do well at both. It’s hard to have big new ideas about important topics. So in practice there’s a tradeoff: you can change readers’ thinking a lot about moderately important things, or… Continue reading
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Curating The Week: Experience In The Digital Age, Swing Changes And Teachers, Social Media Art, Narrative Warfare
“It feels as if the whole world has been transformed into images of the world and has thus been drawn into the human realm, which now encompasses everything. There is no place, no thing, no person or phenomenon that I cannot obtain as image or information. One might think this adds substance to the world,… Continue reading
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