Photo by cottonbro from Pexels. A new report from Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs warns of dangers from Artificial Intelligence (AI) unlike those from androids in dystopian science-fiction movies. This AI, the report’s author, Bruce Schneier, explains, is disembodied, specific to certain tasks, unpredictable,…
Mark Twain was a Confederate soldier for two weeks, but his unit of Missouri irregulars disbanded in part because they heard a Union colonel was sweeping through northern Missouri with a regiment to destroy them all. The colonel was Ulysses S. Grant.
I have been reading with interest the new book Poorly Understood: What America Gets Wrong About Poverty (Oxford UP), by Mark Robert Rank, Lawrence M. Eppard, and Heather E. Bullock. (Rank is a professor in the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis.)…
Courtesy National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian InstitutionCC0 When my first collection of essays was coming out a few years ago, a friend asked me to write down what I had learned about the process of assembling and editing the book, which was different from writing a novel or…
Freak Power: The Ballot or the Bomb is a brief portrait of a brilliant young writer, frustrated with his local and national governments, applying his beliefs to the practice of grassroots politics instead of keeping to the commentariat. For any young writers who wish to “write like Hunter S. Thompson,” or fans who love the Johnny Depp portrayal, the documentary will be instructive.
Artist Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple, reacts to the amount his art sold for at auction in this screenshot from Christie’s YouTube channel. Something important has happened in the art world: the possibility of exclusive ownership of digital art, by blockchain technology. As with Bitcoin, a digital “certificate…
Clockwise, from upper left: Geoff Ward, Jordan Weber, Inez Bordeaux, and Michael Allen The question in yesterday’s Zoom event hosted by the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, in St. Louis, was how artist residencies, art institutions, universities, and activist organizations might work together for social justice. How do you measure…
A screenshot from ‘Tulpan,’ starring Askhat Kuchencherekov as Asa. A stampede of camels groan in the red dust; a dog barks as it streaks past a yurt, in pursuit. This is the opening of Tulpan (2008), a Kazakh narrative film streaming now as part of Filmatique’s Foreign Language…
A still from ‘The Booksellers,’ distributed by Greenwich Entertainment. The documentary The Booksellers was set to release theatrically in 2020, but the pandemic hit, and it made its way to Amazon Prime. The film is a group portrait of lovesickness—the ecstasy, labor, and sometimes disappointment of the…
My baldness is not meant to signify anything, but it does not mean nothing, even to me.
Theodore Dreiser, courtesy of National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution (CC0) One of the literary figures whose association with St. Louis has been mostly forgotten is Theodore Dreiser, author of the novels Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy. Dreiser lived and worked in St. Louis for 16 formative months, from November…
Work done by Eileen Mayberry, at the ‘Find A Grave’ site. The website Find A Grave was started in 1995 by a man named Jim Tipton, as an amateur tribute site for celebrity graves. It became a commercial site in 1998 and began posting photos, submitted by…