If you’ve been enjoying these curated article summaries that dive into cultural, creative, and technological currents, you may find the discussions and analyses on our Substack page worthwhile as well. There, I explore themes and ideas that often intersect with the subjects covered in the articles I come across during my curation process.
While this curation simply aims to surface compelling pieces, our Substack writings delve deeper into topics that have piqued our curiosity over time. From examining the manifestation of language shaping our reality to unpacking philosophical undercurrents in society, our Substack serves as an outlet to unpack our perspectives on the notable trends and undercurrents reflected in these curated readings.
So if any of the articles here have stoked your intellectual interests, I invite you to carry that engagement over to our Substack, where we discuss related matters in more depth. Consider it an extension of the curation – a space to further engage with the fascinating ideas these pieces have surfaced.
One of the earliest written accounts of a man being eaten by a shark is also the account of a shark in love. It appears in “History of the Wars,” an eight-book chronicle by Procopius of Caesarea Palaestinae, born around 500 C.E. Composed under the censoring eye of the Emperor Justinian, the work is mostly so dry that it would be easier to eat than to read. But among the encomiums on war is the tale of an oyster “swimming not far from the shore.” According to Procopius, “Both its valves were standing open and the pearl lay between them, a wonderful sight and notable, for no pearl in all history could be compared with it at all, either in size or in beauty.”
As the oyster swam (Procopius does not seem entirely clear on how an oyster moves, and imagines it flapping like a butterfly), a shark “of enormous size and dreadful fierceness, fell in love with this sight and followed close upon it, leaving it neither day nor night; even when he was compelled to take thought for food, he would only look about for something eatable where he was, and when he found some bit, he would snatch it up and eat it hurriedly.” Then “he would sate himself again with the sight he loved.”
A fisherman, Procopius writes, reported the pearl’s existence to Peroz I, the King of Kings of Iran. Peroz—a man who depicted himself on three different coins with three different crowns, and surely enjoyed a glistening accessory—begged the fisherman to procure it for him. The fisherman waited, “watching for an opportunity of catching the pearl alone without its admirer.” When the shark was distracted by some edible morsel, the fisherman dived for the oyster: “He had seized it and was hastening with all speed to get out of the water, when the shark noticed him and rushed to the rescue. The fisherman saw him coming, and, when he was about to be overtaken not far from the beach, he hurled his booty with all his force upon the land, and was himself soon afterward seized and destroyed.”
How much of this is true? Almost none, of course; the only recorded relationships between sharks and oysters are gustatory rather than romantic. But it’s plausible that a fisherman tangled with a shark while seeking a pearl for the Persian king. And there are still older, less idiosyncratic accounts—Pliny the Elder, in his “Natural History,” from 77 C.E., wrote of the “dogfish,” an early term for shark, that hounded sponge divers:
Read the rest of this article at: The New Yorker
Every few years, Hany Farid and his wife have the grim but necessary conversation about their end-of-life plans. They hope to have many more decades together—Farid is 58, and his wife is 38—but they want to make sure they have their affairs in order when the time comes. In addition to discussing burial requests and financial decisions, Farid has recently broached an eerier topic: If he dies first, would his wife want to digitally resurrect him as an AI clone?
Farid, an AI expert at UC Berkeley, knows better than most that physical death and digital death are two different things. “My wife has my voice, my likeness, and a lot of my writings,” he told me. “She could very easily train a large language model to be an interactive version of me.” Other people have already done precisely that. Instead of grieving a loved one by listening to their voicemails on repeat, you can now upload them to an AI audio program and create a convincing voice clone that wishes you happy birthday. Train a chatbot off a dead person’s emails or texts, and you can forever message a digital approximation of them. There is enough demand for these “deathbots” that many companies, including HereAfter AI and StoryFile, specialize in them.
When it comes to end-of-life planning, recent technology has already dumped new considerations on our plates. It’s not just What happens to my house? but also What happens to my Instagram account? As I have previously written, dead people can linger as digital ghosts through their devices and accounts. But those artifacts help maintain their memory. A deathbot, by contrast, creates a synthetic version of you and lets others interact with it after you’re gone. These tools present a new kind of dilemma: How can you plan for something like digital immortality?
Read the rest of this article at: The Atlantic
On Monday afternoon, a Bombardier BD-700 jet took off from a Las Vegas airport and landed in Paris at 11:11 A.M. Tuesday with Céline Dion inside. Hours later, the Canadian pop superstar was spotted at Le Royal Monceau hotel. “CÉLINE DION MAKES HER ARRIVAL IN PARIS ,” Gala magazine announced, allowing itself to draw the conclusion that Dion would be participating, as rumored, in the Olympics opening ceremony, on Friday. There’s been a sluggish, slightly sour feeling in Paris during the lead-up to the Games, but Dion’s arrival—the opening ceremony to the opening ceremony, one could say—brought a frisson of excitement. Suddenly, it seemed as though things were kicking off.
That same evening, the French President Emmanuel Macron appeared on television for his first interview since the snap legislative elections that he called last month. Unsurprisingly, his interlocutors really wanted to know about Dion. “Will she participate in the ceremony?” one of the presenters asked, in what was probably the liveliest exchange of the entire broadcast. “That would be terrific news,” Macron replied. “Because she’s an immense artist, and I would be immensely happy, like all our countrymen, if she could be at the opening ceremony.” Noting Macron’s teasing use of the conditional tense, the presenter pressed for a confirmation, but the President demurred. “I’m not in charge” of the agenda, Macron said, grinning. “But it would be terrific.”
Read the rest of this article at: The New Yorker
In 2020, Eris Nyx (left) and Jeremy Kalicum (right) founded the Drug User Liberation Front to combat the overdose crisis. Out of a small office on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, they bought clean drugs off the dark web and sold them at cost to a members-only club.
Two activists gave away untainted heroin, cocaine and meth . They say they saved lives. The federal government says they’re drug traffickers.
Eris Nyx has always been rebellious. Growing up in the suburbs outside of Toronto in the mid-2000s, she spent much of her adolescence using drugs, getting into trouble with police and crashing at friends’ houses. Her transgender identity wasn’t accepted at home, and after high school she moved away for good, heading to Vancouver to study at the University of British Columbia. She worked as a bike mechanic for a while, before finding a job as an attendant at a homeless shelter on the city’s Downtown Eastside, a poverty-stricken neighbourhood with one of Canada’s highest rates of injection drug use.
The neighbourhood was then in the early stages of an overdose crisis that would soon become a state of indefinite emergency. In 2015, around the time Nyx began working at the shelter, overdoses claimed nearly 500 British Columbians. The next year, when the province declared a public-health emergency, 800 people died; a year after that, nearly 1,300. Most of the casualties were due to fentanyl, the powerful synthetic opioid dealers were cutting into heroin and pressing into fake oxycontin pills. Drug users could no longer be certain what was in their supply, nor how powerful it would be. On the Downtown Eastside, where people were dying at a rate more than 25 times the national average, the overdose crisis felt like a massacre. Nyx was surrounded by death.
The provincial government responded with more funding for recovery and treatment programs and made it easier to open overdose prevention sites, where people could use drugs in a supervised setting. To Nyx, all of this fell short. Recovery programs could take years to work, if they ever did. Overdose prevention was good, but it didn’t address the underlying problem: a poisoned product. Nyx believed the key was to provide users with safe supply—a legal, untainted and regulated supply of drugs traditionally bought on the illicit market. Nyx also believed that anyone using drugs, even recreationally, deserved the same consumer rights as users of legal substances like alcohol, a product clearly labelled with information about potency and quantity.
In 2018, Nyx founded the Coalition of Peers Dismantling the Drug War. Its goal was to create a peer-to-peer narcotics shop for clean drugs, and its image was transgressive. Its logo was a multi-headed creature with a syringe and pill bottle, surrounded by the faux-Latin phrase illegitimi non carborundum, or “don’t let the bastards grind you down.” This punk-rock attitude was in contrast to more established groups, like the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, founded in 1998. It too was committed to the principles of harm reduction, which aim to mitigate the negative consequences of drug use, like overdoses, rather than promoting abstinence above all else. Its founders had also been involved in illegal activism. But VANDU had long since earned a seat at the table with the city’s political and decision-making class. Nyx’s coalition, on the other hand, put forth a list of implausible demands to government: pardon everyone imprisoned on drug charges, repeal the Controlled Drugs and Substance Act and defund the police.
Read the rest of this article at: Maclean’s
Last year, Rachel Antell, an archival producer for documentary films, started noticing AI-generated images mixed in with authentic photos. There are always holes or limitations in an archive; in one case, film-makers got around a shortage of images for a barely photographed 19th-century woman by using AI to generate what looked like old photos. Which brought up the question: should they? And if they did, what sort of transparency is required? The capability and availability of generative AI – the type that can produce text, images and video – have changed so rapidly, and the conversations around it have been so fraught, that film-makers’ ability to use it far outpaces any consensus on how.
“We realized it was kind of the wild west, and film-makers without any mal-intent were getting themselves into situations where they could be misleading to an audience,” said Antell. “And we thought, what’s needed here is some real guidance.”
So Antell and several colleagues formed the Archival Producers Alliance (APA), a volunteer group of about 300 documentary producers and researchers dedicated to, in part, developing best practices for use of generative AI in factual storytelling. “Instead of being, ‘the house is burning, we’ll never have jobs,’ it’s much more based around an affirmation of why we got into this in the first place,” said Stephanie Jenkins, a founding APA member. Experienced documentary film-makers have “really been wrestling with this”, in part because “there is so much out there about AI that is so confusing and so devastating or, alternatively, a lot of snake oil.”
Last year, Rachel Antell, an archival producer for documentary films, started noticing AI-generated images mixed in with authentic photos. There are always holes or limitations in an archive; in one case, film-makers got around a shortage of images for a barely photographed 19th-century woman by using AI to generate what looked like old photos. Which brought up the question: should they? And if they did, what sort of transparency is required? The capability and availability of generative AI – the type that can produce text, images and video – have changed so rapidly, and the conversations around it have been so fraught, that film-makers’ ability to use it far outpaces any consensus on how.
“We realized it was kind of the wild west, and film-makers without any mal-intent were getting themselves into situations where they could be misleading to an audience,” said Antell. “And we thought, what’s needed here is some real guidance.”
So Antell and several colleagues formed the Archival Producers Alliance (APA), a volunteer group of about 300 documentary producers and researchers dedicated to, in part, developing best practices for use of generative AI in factual storytelling. “Instead of being, ‘the house is burning, we’ll never have jobs,’ it’s much more based around an affirmation of why we got into this in the first place,” said Stephanie Jenkins, a founding APA member. Experienced documentary film-makers have “really been wrestling with this”, in part because “there is so much out there about AI that is so confusing and so devastating or, alternatively, a lot of snake oil.”
Read the rest of this article at: The Guardian
