His screen tests bowled over Korda, Flaherty, and everyone connected with the film. He was absolutely the most winning child they had ever encountered. He was, well, utterly gorgeous, not just his looks, but his manner, his air, his aura. Selar Shalik, who would come to be known simply as "Sabu," did not speak a word of English.
Researchers found that people with schizophrenia had two and a half times the average risk of dying from COVID-19, even after controlling for other risk factors as well as age, sex, and race. Meta-studies consistently show worse COVID-19 outcomes among people with depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia.
I mention the emerging need for woke M&Ms to another friend, and she blinks, puzzled. “But they’re just candy,” she says. “We know the difference.” And this time even I, quick to see and argue symbolism, have to agree with her.
Tech’s latest promise is to engineer our dreams. By rehearsing with VR, zapping certain parts of the brain awake, and cueing it with whispered dream prompts, sounds, even smells, we will be able to rid ourselves of nightmares and implant dreams that make us happy, help us learn, and enhance our memories.
Tiger Lilies, by George Cummings, Wikimedia Commons When we say “dull,” it is often the result of over-familiarity or insufficient study. Those Tiger Lilies were charming yesterday, you said. What changed? Boredom is the collapse of the concrete into idealism. If my city is bustling but tiresome, then…
AI can teach us about patterns and processes, theory and extrapolation, math and aesthetics. But what it communicates will not be sensient, self-aware, rooted in profound emotional experience, or conscious of its audience. Listening to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 10 “finished” with AI is a different experience than hearing music wrought by one man’s genius.
Face it: we love . . . ourselves. And therefore anything that resembles us or adores us. Which made switching to the sloth seem incongruous. Those stupid unicorns were our creation and could fulfill our fantasies. Sloths just hang there.
Still from the interview sponsored by SLCL and HeEC Media. For Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Common Reader Editor Gerald Early interviewed Anna Malaika Tubbs on her recent book, The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation…
The word “feminine” is seldom feminist. But I chose it deliberately, because Fortuny’s dress frees the body to be both elegant and erotic. He did not throw us into a well-tailored pantsuit. Instead, he and Negrin made a dress that required no undergarments, and they did so in a corseted and slipped Edwardian era that refused to trust the female body to be itself.
Market data on display at Taiwan Stock Exchange, by Wang Yu Ching, Office of the President, courtesy CC 2.0 The highs. The lows. The toast breaks. It has been a dizzying day of being a capitalist. My younger son, aware that my elder son has an interest in…