DIRS.INFO The most relevant business & tech news

☆ Why Kristi Noem Is in the Doghouse
▼ + stars: | 2024-05-06 | by ( A.O. Scott | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

In April 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson was photographed lifting one of his beagles (he had two, named Him and Her) by the ears. Johnson won the 1964 presidential election in a landslide. Kristi Noem is no L.B.J. Appearing on “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Noem was unapologetic. She insisted that Cricket, whom she described in her book as an “untrainable” chicken-killer, got what was coming.

Persons: Lyndon B, Johnson, —, Barry Goldwater, Kristi Noem, Donald J, Trump, ”, Mitt Romney, Noem Organizations: White, The South, Cricket Locations: The, The South Dakota, Noem’s

☆ Like My Book Title? Thanks, I Borrowed It.
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-28 | by ( A.O. Scott | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Which two big novels of the past two years borrowed their titles from “Macbeth”? Nailing the answer — “Birnam Wood” and “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” — might make you feel a little smug. ), is enough to spur you to buy a book, the way a search-optimized headline compels you to click a link. The name of a book becomes more memorable when it echoes something you might have heard — or think you should have heard — before. Before the turn of the 20th century titles were more descriptive than allusive.

Persons: don’t, “, Pamela, ” “ Robinson, ”, Marcel Proust, Shakespeare Locations: Wuthering, Bethlehem

☆ ‘Killers of the Flower Moon,’ From Page to Screen
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-02 | by ( ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

David Grann’s 2017 nonfiction book “Killers of the Flower Moon” was a gripping history of greed and murder on an oil-rich Osage reservation in Oklahoma. “Grann has proved himself a master of spinning delicious, many-layered mysteries that also happen to be true,” Dave Eggers wrote in his review for The Times. Scott about both the book and the movie, and the sometimes surprising ways they diverge. “Scorsese’s adaptation … is a very different creature,” Scott says. “It’s the same story, but it has such a different feel and texture, and gets you thinking about different aspects of the story.”

Persons: David Grann’s, “ Grann, ” Dave Eggers, Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, Gilbert Cruz, Scott, ” Scott, “, ” Organizations: The Times Locations: Oklahoma

☆ Are Fears of A.I. and Nuclear Apocalypse Keeping You Up? Blame Prometheus.
▼ + stars: | 2023-10-21 | by ( A.O. Scott | More About A.O. Scott | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

The atomic bomb may be, for the soldiers and politicians, a powerful strategic tool in war and diplomacy. He snatched a spark of quantum insight from those divinities and handed it to Harry S. Truman and the U.S. Army Air Forces. (The notable exception is Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb and as such another potential Prometheus.) Like the original Prometheus, Oppenheimer survives his disgrace, and ends the movie as a flawed, haunted, regretful creature, carrying a flicker of inextinguishable, theoretical guilt. A.I., on the other hand, seems newly sprung from science fiction, and especially terrifying because we can’t quite grasp what it will become.

Persons: Oppenheimer, “ Oppenheimer, —, Oppenheimer wasn’t, Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg, Harry S, Truman, ”, Edward Teller, von Neumann Organizations: U.S . Army Air Forces Locations: Hiroshima, Nagasaki

☆ He Dissected Trump. Now Michael Wolff Performs an Autopsy on Fox News.
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-19 | by ( A.O. Scott | More About A.O. Scott | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

A story of chaotic corporate stewardship and generational conflict unfolds in the shadow of a looming actuarial certainty. A gritty reboot of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” you might say. In Wolff’s view, playing the saga for laughs is a risky choice: “To treat the Fox phenomenon and the Murdoch family as a cultural confection ripe for comedy,” he writes, “may be dangerously close to liberal sacrilege.”Maybe. You could also argue that laughing at Fox News — and at Donald J. Trump, the subject of Wolff’s recent best-selling trilogy and a major offstage character in “The Fall” — has been a cherished liberal pastime for years. Not that Wolff, who likes to play peekaboo with his own ideological leanings, has anything but contempt for a media mainstream (The Times very much included) that he sees as imprisoned by soggy left-leaning sentiments.

Persons: Murdoch, Michael Wolff Michael Wolff’s, Rupert Murdoch, Wolff, ”, “, The Mary Tyler Moore, Donald J, Trump, —, soggy Organizations: Fox News

☆ Nobody Ever Read American Literature Like This Guy Did
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-29 | by ( A.O. Scott | More About A.O. Scott | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

It has been a hundred years since D.H. Lawrence published “Studies in Classic American Literature,” and in the annals of literary criticism the book may still claim the widest discrepancy between title and content. Not with respect to subject matter: As advertised, this compact volume consists of essays on canonical American authors of the 18th and 19th centuries — a familiar gathering of dead white men. Some (Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman) are still household names more than a century later, while others (Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Richard Henry Dana Jr.) have faded into relative obscurity. My point is that nobody ever read them like Lawrence did — as madly, as wildly or as insightfully. “Studies in Classic American Literature” is as dull a phrase as any committee of professors could devise.

Persons: Lawrence, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Hector St, John de Crèvecoeur, Richard Henry Dana Jr, Melville’s, Moby, Dick, ”, Farmer ”, — Organizations: “

☆ Everyone Likes Reading. Why Are We So Afraid of It?
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-21 | by ( A.O. Scott | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

Among Douglass’s most powerful and painful revelations is that, on the subject of reading, his master was right. Substitute “reading” for “freedom” in that last sentence and the meaning stays the same. Reading liberates and torments us, enlightens and bewilders us, makes and unmakes our social and solitary selves. The methods of reading instruction associated with Columbia University’s Teachers College were in full bloom there. The rooms were furnished with well-stocked, low-slung bookshelves and carpeted risers where young readers could curl up with “just-right books,” selections matched to their interests and levels of proficiency.

Persons: Frederick, ”, Hugh, Mandeville, Prometheus, “ Organizations: Reading, Columbia University’s Teachers College Locations: Brooklyn

☆ Riding Into a Bloodred Sunset
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-14 | by ( A.O. Scott | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

A page of Cormac McCarthy might sometimes be taken for poetry or scripture: the lean lines; the sparse punctuation; the jagged right-hand margin. They must have flown as they were riding up. If they’s a dead cow in the pasture will the rest of the cattle stay there? McCarthy, like every writer, belonged to his time, even as, perhaps more intently than most writers, he labored to create work that would outlast it. Not that they remotely resemble one another: Each represents a singular sensibility and an original voice, a personality on the page that is unmistakable and inimitable.

Persons: Cormac McCarthy, “, ”, McCarthy, Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, Sade, Updike, Toni Morrison, Susan Sontag, Philip Roth, Joan Didion, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Oates Organizations: The New York Locations: The, Southwestern

☆ Good Night, Sweet Prince
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-22 | by ( A.O. Scott | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

What I mean is that I liked him better, and trusted him more. But it was also easy to imagine arguing about all that over drinks and cigarettes, thanks to Amis’s inexhaustible intellectual brio and his undentable good humor. That quality, even more than his satirical flair or the buoyant elegance of his prose, marks his greatest feat of self-invention. Whether these are still — or ever were — defining characteristics of American culture is an argument for another day. The point is that they were decidedly not attitudes associated with English writers up until then, especially not those of Kingsley Amis’s generation.

☆ Some of the Books That Hernan Diaz Owns Surprise Even Him
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-18 | by ( ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

Scott, Deborah Eisenberg, Paul Yoon, Ottessa Moshfegh, Michael Ondaatje, Louise Erdrich, Colson Whitehead, Sigrid Nunez, Jean Strouse, Lorrie Moore. The novel contains four different books, written by different fictional authors in disparate genres and styles. “Trust” closes with a personal diary that is also a sort of a prose poem and a love letter to modernism. While writing this, I read and revisited authors as different as Jean Rhys, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Dawn Powell, Theodor Adorno and Gertrude Stein. Wodehouse section of my library and can report that I’ve read 29 of his books.

☆ ‘The Godfather of A.I.’ Quits and More: The Week in Reporter Reads
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-05 | by ( ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

Geoffrey Hinton was an artificial intelligence pioneer. In 2012, Dr. Hinton and two of his graduate students at the University of Toronto created technology that became the intellectual foundation for the A.I. systems that the tech industry’s biggest companies believe is a key to their future. On Monday, however, he officially joined a growing chorus of critics who say those companies are racing toward danger with their aggressive campaign to create products based on generative A.I., the technology that powers popular chatbots like ChatGPT. A part of him, he said, now regrets his life’s work.

☆ Tucker Carlson’s Code of Whiteness
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-03 | by ( A.O. Scott | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

At stake is not the life or safety of the anonymous “Antifa kid,” but rather Carlson’s own perception of himself. That phrase, a syntactic echo of “it’s not how white men fight,” establishes the stakes, which are not so much Carlson’s ethical probity as his racial superiority. “The Antifa creep is a human being,” he writes. I should be bothered by it.” The “shoulds” indicate that Carlson isn’t really bothered — is still actually gloating — but is aware that this reaction poses a problem. If he takes pleasure in watching an Antifa creep get pounded, that makes him as bad as the Antifa creep.

☆ And the 2023 Oscar Nominees Should Be …
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-05 | by ( Manohla Dargis | A.O. Scott | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

And the 2023 Oscar Nominees Should Be …Academy voters will do what they want, but if our chief critics had their way, these are the films and performers that would be up for Oscars this year.

Search resuls for: "A.O. Scott"

13 mentions found