In last week’s Sunday Best, we looked at the New York Times article that explored the trend of Americans seeking out the “good life” in Europe, drawn to the continent’s vibrant culture, rich history, and beautiful landscapes. The NYT’s piece highlights affordable property rental and ownership opportunities in countries like Italy, France, and Spain.
For residents of southeast Paris, the construction vehicles rumbling back and forth behind the Austerlitz train station are a loud annoyance that has gone on for too many months. But for city officials—and countless Parisians, they hope—history is unfolding behind the cordoned-off area. After years of thwarted ambitions and vague promises, the French capital, officials say, is set to accomplish a rare feat for a major metropolis: making its once heavily polluted waterway fit for swimming again.
What is a newspaper? Though a few decades ago the answer might have been obvious, it’s no longer so easy to say. Newspapers have long been about more than just news; they appear less and less on paper and, despite their geographically inflected names, aren’t firmly rooted in any particular place. The New York Times is probably the first thing that comes to mind when you think of an old-fashioned extra-extra-hear-all-about-it newspaper, but it’s also the poster child for the medium’s metamorphosis.
P AND I WERE caught up in a long conversation about AI this weekend, and it's something that has also been mentioned here at TIG quite a bit lately. He is an early adopter for most things, while I can be a nostalgist⏤not because I don't love technology (I do), but because I can be a bit sentimental sometimes.
When OpenAI launched ChatGPT, with zero fanfare, in late November 2022, the San Francisco–based artificial-intelligence company had few expectations. Certainly, nobody inside OpenAI was prepared for a viral mega-hit. The firm has been scrambling to catch up—and capitalize on its success—ever since.
The buzz around ChatGPT is hitting a critical mass⏤a collective frenzy, even, and there are equal amounts of hype and skepticism. In the Wall Street Journal, Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher stated in ChatGPT Heralds an Intellectual Revolution that, “A new technology bids to transform the human cognitive process as it has not been shaken up since the invention of printing.”
For months in the spring of 1921, a women’s-only private dorm at the University of California, Berkeley was rocked by a crime wave. College Hall, located on the northeastern corner of campus, where Hearst Avenue began to climb into the hills, was home to 90 young, mostly affluent women—18- and 19-year-olds, whose possessions kept disappearing.
Allison is an actress. When we meet up for coffee — she has an almond-milk cortado — in midtown, something’s different about her, but I’m not sure what. She looks like an Instagram version of herself but in real life. It turns out she’s down about ten pounds and happy about it. “Somebody once told me I had a size-zero personality, and they assumed that I was thinner than I was,” she tells me. “We don’t talk about it, but everybody knows it. Thin is power.”
No artist wants to be on the end of harsh public criticism but are artists becoming too fragile and defensive in the face of critics? This week I came across an interesting video of the music critic Anthony Fantano doing a review of the hip hop artist Logic, doing a review of Fantano’s review of Chance the rapper album, The Big Day.
TIME AGAIN for another Life Lately, and these past few days and weeks have felt rather busy, especially following the enforced hibernation of the lockdown years, which are beginning to feel like a million lifetimes ago now. There was an early morning train ride to Edinburgh at the beginning of the month and another to Glasgow the following day; and then all the way to the south, nearly as far as Wales just last week...
In his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed some interesting tendencies in his fellow humans. In one now-famous anecdote, he described his secretary’s early interactions with his program ELIZA, a proto-chatbot he created in 1966. Following a set of rules meant to approximate patient-directed Rogererian psychotherapy, and following a simple script called DOCTOR, the program made quite an impression ...
Steven Soderbergh is the rare filmmaker who views a sequel as a chance to do something different. In a moviemaking era suffused with safe and predictable follow-ups, Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Twelve remains a sterling example of a strange, surprising left turn from its predecessor’s formula.
The ways we socialize and date, commute and work are nearly unrecognizable from what they were three years ago. We’ve enjoyed a global pandemic, open employer-employee warfare, a multifront culture war, and social upheavals both great and small. The old conventions are out (we don’t whisper the word cancer or let women off the elevator first anymore, for starters).
In 2012, when Steven Soderbergh and Channing Tatum released “Magic Mike,” a moist, underlit caper about male entertainers at a Tampa strip club, they thought they were making an indie. Instead, the film grossed a hundred and sixty-seven million dollars, spawning an international franchise.
WE HAVE been out of town for the past three days, and there's something about taking time away from work that's refreshing. When we returned home yesterday evening, I was ready to get to work, fresh from a break from routine. The time away also made me think about my home office set-up⏤things that are working and things that could be improved, and so I searched around for some inspiration.
