In the small city of Ostuni in southern Italy, a group of remote workers and digital nomads arrive at a community center to meet a troupe of Italian grandmothers, or nonnas, for a pasta making class. They gather around tables to watch as the nonnas demonstrate how to slice and smash strips of hand-rolled dough to make orecchiette, one of the Apulia region’s signature pasta dishes. For locals, the culinary ritual is a familiar one, but for these newly arrived digital nomads, it’s a unique glimpse into the traditions of their temporary new home.
“You have this type of cooking class in Italy now, but they’re quite touristic,” says Serena Chironna, co-founder of KINO Italy, which organizes month-long coworking retreats in lesser-known corners of Italy, where villages are at risk of extinction, and small cities like Ostuni are popular tourist destinations for only a couple months a year. “But in this case, we went to the elderly center, where they’d go every day to play cards. We cooked together and we danced. And it was something you would never do, like, dancing with some local grandmothers.”
The community center visit is just one of the many activities Chironna coordinates with KINO, where remote workers can pay a flat rate to get a month of accommodation, access to a co-working space, and experience social outings with locals. It’s among a new crop of similar programs rolling out across Europe including the EU-backed Nomadland Project; six-month program Summer of Pioneers, which takes digital nomads to rural villages in Germany; a platform funded by the Spanish government promoting 42 rural villages; and Chateau Coliving, a 12th-century castle in rural Normandy converted into a coliving space for digital nomads.
Read the rest of this article at: Conde Nast Traveler
On July 13, 1833, during a visit to the Cabinet of Natural History at the Jardin des Plantes, in Paris, Ralph Waldo Emerson had an epiphany. Peering at the museum’s specimens—butterflies, hunks of amber and marble, carved seashells—he felt overwhelmed by the interconnectedness of nature, and humankind’s place within it.
The experience inspired him to write “The Uses of Natural History,” and to articulate a philosophy that put naturalism at the center of intellectual life in a technologically chaotic age—guiding him, along with the collective of writers and radical thinkers known as transcendentalists, to a new spiritual belief system. Through empirical observation of the natural world, Emerson believed, anyone could become “a definer and map-maker of the latitudes and longitudes of our condition”—finding agency, individuality, and wonder in a mechanized age.
America was crackling with invention in those years, and everything seemed to be speeding up as a result. Factories and sugar mills popped up like dandelions, steamships raced to and from American ports, locomotives tore across the land, the telegraph connected people as never before, and the first photograph was taken, forever altering humanity’s view of itself. The national mood was a mix of exuberance, anxiety, and dread.
Read the rest of this article at: The Atlantic
“Meg really doesn’t think she feels up for any interviews. She never liked them.” This message is conveyed to me thirdhand, via the guy who ran the small Detroit label that put out the first White Stripes seven-inches back in 1998, who has spoken with the band’s extremely introverted drummer’s close friend, who apparently has delivered my request to the woman herself. After roughly three years of persistent (yet respectful) inquiry into whether Meg White might be open to talking about her legacy, I’ve inched closer to the inner sanctum. Plus, I’m told, she’s agreed to give my plea “some more thought.” It’s thrilling, to say the least.
That said, the content of this most recent response is by no means privileged. Meg’s discomfort with interviews is widely known. A few months ago, before the search results under her name were flooded with tributes defending her minimal drumming style against a critical tweet, one of the first links to come up was a YouTube video titled 15 Minutes of Meg White.
Read the rest of this article at: Elle
In the summer of 2020, Jonas Rey, a private investigator in Geneva, got a call from a client with a hunch. The client, the British law firm Burlingtons, represented an Iranian-born American entrepreneur, Farhad Azima, who believed that someone had hacked his e-mail account. Azima had recently helped expose sanctions-busting by Iran, so Iranian hackers were likely suspects. But the Citizen Lab, a research center at the University of Toronto, had just released a report concluding “with high confidence” that scores of cyberattacks on journalists, environmentalists, and financiers had been orchestrated by BellTroX, a company, based in New Delhi, that was running a giant hacking-for-hire enterprise. The operation had targeted numerous Americans. Burlingtons wondered: could Rey try to find out if Azima had been another BellTroX victim? He said yes.
Researchers at Citizen Lab had learned of BellTroX’s activities from someone that the company had tried to trick with “spear phishing”—sending a bogus message to trick a recipient into providing access to personal data. Citizen Lab spent three years investigating BellTroX, including by analyzing Web sites used to shorten and disguise phishing links, combing through social-media accounts of BellTroX’s employees, and contacting victims. Reuters, in coördination with Citizen Lab, published an exposé on BellTroX the same day as the report. But BellTroX’s owner denied any wrongdoing, the Indian authorities never publicly responded to the allegations, and the accusations remained unconfirmed.
Read the rest of this article at: The New Yorker
Alarm over artificial intelligence has reached a fever pitch in recent months. Just this week, more than 300 industry leaders published a letter warning AI could lead to human extinction and should be considered with the seriousness of “pandemics and nuclear war”.
Terms like “AI doomsday” conjure up sci-fi imagery of a robot takeover, but what does such a scenario actually look like? The reality, experts say, could be more drawn out and less cinematic – not a nuclear bomb but a creeping deterioration of the foundational areas of society.
“I don’t think the worry is of AI turning evil or AI having some kind of malevolent desire,” said Jessica Newman, director of University of California Berkeley’s Artificial Intelligence Security Initiative.
“The danger is from something much more simple, which is that people may program AI to do harmful things, or we end up causing harm by integrating inherently inaccurate AI systems into more and more domains of society.”
That’s not to say we shouldn’t be worried. Even if humanity-annihilating scenarios are unlikely, powerful AI has the capacity to destabilize civilizations in the form of escalating misinformation, manipulation of human users, and a huge transformation of the labor market as AI takes over jobs.
Read the rest of this article at: The Guardian
