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☆ Some Authors Were Left Out of Awards Held in China. Leaked Emails Show Why.
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-17 | by ( Alexandra Alter | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Suspicions in the science fiction community have been building for weeks that something was amiss with last year’s awards, which rotate to a different city each year, and in 2023 were hosted in Chengdu, China. What are the Hugo Awards? The awards, first established in 1953, are given annually at a gathering hosted by the World Science Fiction Convention. Writers are nominated and awarded prizes by members of the World Science Fiction Society, which includes science fiction fans. In January, the Hugo Awards revealed which writers had been nominated for last year’s awards, and by how many people.

Persons: Ursula K, Le Guin, William Gibson, Philip K, Dick, Hugo, Kuang, Xiran Jay Zhao Organizations: Science, Convention, Writers, Science Fiction Society, Canadian Locations: China, Chengdu, American, Oxford

☆ The Vision Pro's scary side effect
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-11 | by ( Adam Rogers | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +11 min

The reviews are in, and the tech press is lauding the Apple Vision Pro headset for delivering on the company's promises. Apple and Meta are hoping that this virtual world will be so compelling that you won't just visit. Apple Vision Pro AppleThese are all, as the IT people say, known issues. When people adapt to a perceptual change for long enough, the real world starts to look wrong in the opposite direction. In the meantime, while he's doing his work, maybe don't forget to take that Vision Pro off once in a while.

Persons: It's, They're, you'll, Jeremy Bailenson, You've, That's, they're, techies, Bailenson's, passthrough, Bailenson, doesn't, I've, William Gibson, We've, he's, Adam Rogers Organizations: Apple, Meta, Stanford, Honda, Business

☆ How Jewish People Built the American Theater
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-29 | by ( Jesse Green | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +46 min

Let Us Tell You A Story How Jewish people built the American theater as we know it. The theater, which for many Jews was a major way of becoming American in the first place, seems unable to acknowledge that the danger that American Jews face is not just historical, and not just onstage. (Both of Adler’s parents were Yiddish theater stars — her father, Jacob Adler, was a renowned Shylock in 1903.) Embedding their own observation and experience within Stanislavsky’s, along with the best of Yiddish theater and a generous dollop of Freud, they converted the American theater to Judaism. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe Jewish contribution to the creation of the American theater was built on the acknowledgment of a larger humanity alive within each of us, available to some, with natural empathy and rigorous training.

Persons: Glocca, “, Lerner, Loewe, ”, Isidore Hochberg, Burton Lane, né Burton Levy, William Goldman, “ Killybegs, Sammy Davis Jr, Julie Andrews, Connie Francis, Rosemary Clooney, Tommy Dorsey, Davis, —, Arthur Miller’s “, joyously, Jason Schmidt, Christine Jones, Miller, I’ve, Marilyn Monroe, Robert Brustein, Neil Simon’s, ” Cynthia Ozick, Sholom, Philip Roth, Simon, Leonard Bernstein, Matt Nadel, Bradley, Bernstein, “ Maestro, Shylock, William Shakespeare’s “, Venice ”, Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe’s, Farah Karim, Cooper, Bard ”, “ Merchant, Tom Stoppard’s, Sara Krulwich, Ansky’s, Stella Adler, Bessie Berger, Clifford Odets’s, Arthur Miller, Elia Kazan, Francis Joseph Bruguière, Billy Rose, Eugene Smith, Roth, Arthur Schnitzler, Juliet Stevenson, Ruth Wolff, Lorraine Hansberry’s, Sidney’s, Alex Edelman’s “, Leo Frank, Bernard B, Frank, Mandy Patinkin, James Lapine, Stephen Sondheim’s, George, Martha Swope, outspokenness, creatives, Oscar Isaac, Sidney, “ Sidney Brustein, Isaac, Stevenson, Robert Icke, Roman Catholic Cooper, Rachel Brosnahan, Maisel, Joan Rivers —, Brosnahan, Sidney Brustein’s, Alec Guinness, Fagin, “ Oliver Twist, I’m, Micaela Diamond, Ben Platt, Lucille, Alfred Uhry, Jason Robert Brown’s, Rivers, Wolff, Robert, Republic ”, isn’t, LEE Strasberg, Konstantin Stanislavsky’s, Fyodor Ivanovich, Strasberg, Israel Strassberg, Zalmon, Srulke, Joseph Stein, Sheldon Harnick, Jerry Bock’s “, Bette Midler, Jackie Hoffman, Photofest Stanislavsky, Theater’s, Isaac Butler, Stanislavsky, Harold Clurman, George Bernard Shaw, Henrik Ibsen, Clurman, Adler, Jacob Adler, Freud, Rebecca Naomi Jones, Ruthie Rivkin, Jerome Weidman, Harold Rome’s “, John Weidman, disown Strasberg, Sanford Meisner, Bobby Lewis, né, Marlon Brando, James Dean, Meisner, Robert Duvall, Lewis, Meryl Streep, Clifford Odets, Jacob Garfinkle, Jules Garfield, Odets, Sam Feinschreiber, Garfield, Ralph Berger, wasn’t, John, Tovah Feldshuh, Golda Meir, William Gibson’s, Aaron Epstein, exigencies, Bessie, Feinschreiber —, loveless, William Fox, Louis B, Mayer, Jack Warner, Marjorie Morningstar ”, Morgenstern, Marjorie, Natalie Wood, Anne Frank ”, Millie Perkins, Audrey Hepburn, Susan Strasberg —, Ibsen, Sholom Aleichem, August Wilson, Daveed Diggs, Thomas Jefferson, Lin, Manuel Miranda’s “ Hamilton ”, Adrian Lester, Emanuel Lehman —, Barbra Streisand, Marmelstein, George Silk, Miller’s, Sophie Okonedo, Elizabeth Proctor, Ben Whishaw, John Proctor, Jan Versweyveld, Don’t, — Bernstein, Stoppard, Schnitzler, Jeanine Tesori, Tony Kushner’s “ Caroline, Sharon D Clarke, Adam Makké, Noah Gellman, Leo, Stoppard —, Hermine, ” Leo Frank, there’s, Matthew Broderick, Eugene Jerome, it’s, Edelman’s, Queens bigots, David Yosef Shimon ben Elazar Reuven Alexander Halevi Edelman, Woody Allen, Joshua Harmon’s, — George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, Porgy, Bess ”, Barns, Alex Edelman, Paula Vogel, Harvey Fierstein, Jordan Taylor Fuller, — that’s, Wendell Pierce, Friedman, Jacobs, Hirschfeld, Gershwin, Rodgers, PAULA VOGEL, BRANDON URANOWITZ, DAVID CROMER, MICAELA DIAMOND, TONY KUSHNER, Diamond, Monica Rich Kosann, Marco Bicego, JESSE EISENBERG, MATTHEW BRODERICK, AMY HERZOG, LESLIE RODRIGUEZ KRITZER, JOEL GREY, Herzog, Michael Kors, Kritzer, Marco, HARVEY FIERSTEIN, LIEV SCHREIBER, ETHAN SLATER, IDINA MENZEL, TINA LANDAU Organizations: Broadway, Broadway’s Lyceum, “, of Venice, New York Times, Defamation League, New York Public Library, Performing, Vandamm, Billy, Billy Rose Theatre Division, Performing Arts, New, Jacobs, Empire State, Nazi, Goyim Defense, The New York Public Library, Roman Catholic, New York City, Street, Moscow Art, Group, Hollywood, Disney, Everett, The New York Times, Philadelphia, Brit, Times Locations: Poland, American, kilts, E.Y, Harburg, Kilkerry, Kildare, Philadelphia, New York, Polish, Massachusetts, Vichy, Biloxi, Venice, Malta, of, ”, Germany, playgoers, Sweden, England, United States, Pittsburgh, Nazi, Brustein’s, Greenwich, Georgia, Gutenberg, “, Atlanta, Republic, New, Konstantin Stanislavsky’s Moscow, Russian, America, Moscow, Stanislavsky’s, Clurman, Eastern Europe, Czech, Austrian, Auschwitz, Heini, Southern, Brighton, Rivers, French Republic, “ Brigadoon

☆ Science Fiction From Latin America, With Zombie Dissidents and Aliens in the Amazon
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-10 | by ( Emily Hart | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

A spaceship lands near a small town in the Amazon, leaving the local government to manage an alien invasion. Across Latin America, shelves labeled “ciencia ficción,” or science fiction, have long been filled with translations of H.P. Now they might have to compete with a new wave of Latin American writers who are making the genre their own, rerooting it in their homelands and histories. Shrugging off rolling cornfields and New York skylines, they set their stories against the dense Amazon, craggy Andean mountainscapes and unmistakably Latin American urban sprawl. The avalanche of original science fiction is timely, arriving as many readers and writers in Latin America feel choked by the folksy tropes of magical realism and desensitized by realist depictions of the region’s struggles with violence.

Persons: Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, William Gibson, New York skylines Locations: America, Wells, New York

☆ ChatGPT Secret Training Data: the Top 50 Books AI Bots Are Reading
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-30 | by ( Adam Rogers | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +13 min

To figure out what GPT-4 has read, they quizzed it on its knowledge of various books, as if it were a high-school English student. One way to answer the question is to look for information that could have come from only one place. Genre — sci-fi, mystery, romance, horror — is, broadly speaking, more interesting, partially because these books have plots where things actually happen. Bamman's GPT-4 list is a Borgesian library of episodic connections, cliffhangers, third-act complications, and characters taking arms against seas of troubles (and whales). See what a bot makes of Gene Wolfe's "The Book of the New Sun," maybe, or Sheri Tepper's "Grass."

☆ ‘The Peripheral’ Review: Dystopian Futures Not Very Far Away
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-21 | by ( John Anderson | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

In the 2099 London imagined by “The Peripheral,” the Gherkin, the Eye and the Strand have all survived. So has kitsch: A 1,000-foot Venus de Milo shadows Big Ben. (“Winged Victory” is elsewhere, along with gargantuan versions of the Discobolus of Myron and the David of Michelangelo). Some institutions seem to have simply vanished: You can rent out Buckingham Palace for company parties, if you can assemble enough humans for a party. Whatever has gone on since the year 2032, it hasn’t been good.

☆ 'The Peripheral' review: Chloë Grace Moretz stars in Amazon's convoluted sci-fi series, which travels into two futures and still isn't worth the time
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-21 | by ( Review Brian Lowry | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +3 min

CNN —In terms of Nolan brothers productions, “The Peripheral” appears to have been made for people who think “Tenet” and the fourth season of “Westworld” weren’t complicated enough. Because of Flynne’s role in that future threats keep invading her present, which is every bit as confusing as that sounds. Although there’s plenty of violent action and cool futuristic weaponry, “The Peripheral” feels like a mashup of sci-fi ideas put to better use elsewhere, from “Avatar” to “Free Guy,” with a lot in between. Mostly, other than the sometimes-striking set design, there’s nothing particularly distinctive about the villains or the scenario, which feels more convoluted than engaging. It’s produced by Warner Bros. Television, like CNN, a unit of Warner Bros.

☆ A weird evolutionary quirk in the human eye could be what saves us from climate change
▼ + stars: | 2022-07-19 | by ( Adam Rogers | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +8 min

The difference: climate change, our dunderheaded anti-terraforming of Earth. Climate change has been going on for a century and a half. Then that derecho — souped up by an atmosphere pumped full of heat energy, thanks to climate change — swept across South Dakota. In the US, only young people and those who identify as Democrats think dealing with climate change should be a top priority, according to surveys from Pew Research. About half of Americans think humans are only partially responsible for climate change, or not responsible at all.

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