When I hear other people talking about procrastination, I find myself getting proprietorial: surely their fleeting pauses are as nothing to mine. Procrastination is the main way I express anxiety and depression, if I can use these medicalised, dignifying terms. It’s franker to say that I put things…

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/magazine/the-great-ai-awakening.html?&version=readinglist&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=c-column-middle-span-region&region=c-column-middle-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-middle-span-region

Debate: The “Latin Empire” should strike back Detail from the 2nd century Portonaccio sarcophagus, representing a battle between Romans and Germans. 26 March 2013 – Libération (Paris) Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has revived the idea of a union of Southern European countries, a proposal first…

Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in October, 2016.Photograph: Getty Images B elow the medieval citadel in Kazan, two vast frozen rivers turn the landscape white. On a Saturday afternoon there are a few hardy locals shuffling through the icy sludge to take selfies against the mosque, the…

Now imagine if an aerial image of New York could camouflage itself as one from Hong Kong, or Milan. That’s just one of the things Invisible Cities , a new project from Italy’s Opendot (which includes Gene Kogan, Gabriell Gambotto, Ambika Jib Samsen, Michele Ferretti, Andrej Boleslavsky, Damiano Gui,…

Arts+CultureQ+A ‘Art Fair’ is a film made by Talk Hole that looks at the deathly competitiveness of New York’s art scene and how no-one’s really saying anything, are they? 1 December 2016 Text Thomas Gorton Maybe you’ve been to an art opening, or an art fair. You’re clutching a flute of lukewarm…

Donald Trump owed his election victory to his popularity in rust-belt areas, such as Schuylkill Haven, Pennsylvania.Photograph: Mark Makela/Getty Images I have no tribe. I have no comfort blanket, no default button that enables me to join the prevailing hysteria and cry in unison, “Of course, it’s…

Nonfiction A scene from “High Anxiety” (1977), with Mel Brooks and Madeline Kahn. Credit... 20th Century Fox Amazon Apple Books Barnes and Noble Local Booksellers When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. AMERICA THE ANXIOUS How Our Pursuit…

The Holy Southern Empire: a proposal for Southern European anarcho-papism Written by Federico Campagna, 16.09.2013 Cura hominum potuit tantam componere Romam, quantam non potuit solvere cura deum. Hildebertus, Carmina Minora , no.36 Beyond the Latin Empire A few months ago, the Italian philosopher…

Catholicism As Radical Atheism Written by Federico Campagna, 24.03.2014 Steering clear of absolutist atheism My radically atheist attack against normative abstractions, however, was for the great part dissimilar from traditional atheism. While traditional atheism locates its critique on an…

IN MID-OCTOBER, the Nobel Committee for Literature awarded the Nobel Prize to Bob Dylan, “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” The announcement came shortly after the most recent Annual Arts Basic Survey (AABS) by the National Endowment for the Arts…

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/nov/22/hygge-conspiracy-denmark-cosiness-trend?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Add_to_Instapaper

By the time last week’s presidential election was finally called for Donald Trump during the wee hours of Wednesday morning, the initial disbelief felt by the millions of Americans who had been assured of a Clinton victory by the media had turned into shock and panic — if not yet full-blown despair.…

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n20/malcolm-bull/great-again

Against Everything: On Dishonest Times by Mark Greif Verso, 304 pp, £16.99, September 2016, ISBN 978 1 78478 592 5 When the American journal n+1 was launched in 2004, an editorial in the first number lamented the state of contemporary culture. We are living, it said, at ‘a time when serious writing…

A ll politicians love to complain about the press. They complain for good reasons and bad. They cry over frivolous slights and legitimate inquiries alike. They

I, Daniel Blake , Ken Loach’s new film, has kicked off a row between the director and The Sunday Times ’ film critic, Camilla Long. Published on Sunday, the review – which called the film a “povvo safari for middle-class do-gooders” – has led to Loach and some audience members rowing with Long…

Karl Marx famously argued that alienation of labour (our most basic activity) meant that we felt human only during ‘animal functions’ such as eating and drinking. Of course, Marx had never met Rob Rhinehart, the entrepreneur recently featured in a Lizzie Widdicombe New Yorker piece for his efforts…

Donald Trump seeks a return to 1950s America, well before the age of neoliberalism.Photograph: H. Armstrong Roberts/Retrofile/Getty Images T he western financial crisis of 2007-8 was the worst since 1931, yet its immediate repercussions were surprisingly modest. The crisis challenged the foundation…

Tasters have compared Soylent to Cream of Wheat and “my grandpa’s Metamucil.” Photograph by Henry Hargreaves In December of 2012, three young men were living in a claustrophobic apartment in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, working on a technology startup. They had received a hundred and seventy…

transcript 0:00/1:59 -1:59 transcript For Trump, ‘We’ Are Good and ‘They’ Are Bad Donald J. Trump led cheering supporters through a landscape of foes that must beaten, sent away or discredited. Donald J. Trump led cheering supporters through a landscape of foes that must beaten, sent away or…

Books of The Times Kristin Dombek Credit... Amy Touchette A specter is haunting America: the specter of narcissism. It shows up in the flood of recent books with titles like “Narcissists Exposed” and “The Narcissist Next Door,” in hand-wringing over Instagram-addicted millennials, in studies showing…

A film by Tsai Ming-liang can feel like a test. More specifically, a staring contest. How long can you look? Somewhere into the eleven-minute sequence in Stray Dog s (2013), where the protagonist hugs, kisses, and then devours a cabbage with a human face painted on it, I blinked. Tsai has been…

In almost every film Michael Haneke has made, an animal dies on-screen. The protagonists of The Seventh Continent (1989), his first feature, smash the tank of their family goldfish, which we watch writhe and asphyxiate. In the German-language Funny Games (1997), the preppy intruders who terrorize a…

Subscribe Writing a personal essay can be a full-body activity, replete with tremors and tears and physical aches. Recollection is strenuous. Recreating a scene can be downright exhausting. In those instances, I prefer the tolls to be paid on my own terms. At my personal blog, I spent seven years…

The Rolling Stones, 1963. Monitor Picture Library/Photoshot/Getty Images This article is adapted from Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination . In January of 1973—the same month that the Rolling Stones were banned from touring Japan due to prior drug convictions, the same…

Slogan city: a protestor fights back against gentrification.Photograph: Frantzesco Kangaris/Observer I have started a list in the back of a notebook, a short dictionary of the language of gentrification. It began with the word “decanted”. Typically we decant wine from a bottle into a carafe in order…

Everything Was For Ever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation by Alexei Yurchak Princeton, 331 pp, £15.95, December 2005, ISBN 0 691 12117 6 If there is a prize for best title of the year, this book surely deserves it. Alexei Yurchak, a Russian-born, US-trained anthropologist, has…

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http://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2016/9/14/12910180/noam-chomsky-tom-wolfe-linguist

American Artist, A Refusal (2015), Online performance, Ongoing In art that defines itself by what it withholds from public view lies the challenge for us to do the same AN image that is not shared publicly on social media platforms, a dignity image provides the means by which Internet users may gain…

Photo Op by kennardphillipps at Catalyst: Contemporary Art and War exhibition at IWM North Photograph: kennardphillipps/Reuters T ony Blair grins for his photograph as he holds up his smartphone to take a selfie. He's delighted with himself and what he's done. Behind him, black smoke and hellish…

When I was growing up, all through elementary school we would watch movies and read books about the Berenstein Bears. I still even remember the theme song for the TV show, mostly, which wasn't a song so much as a guy in a gruff bear voice speaking in rhyming couplets. If you don't know who the…

Forget telephoto lenses and fake mustaches: The most important tools for America’s 35,000 private investigators are database subscription services. For more than a decade, professional snoops have been able to search troves of public and nonpublic records—known addresses, DMV records, photographs of…

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century's end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There's every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite…

A secret question hovers over us, a sense of disappointment, a broken promise we were given as children about what our adult world was supposed to be like. I am referring not to the standard false promises that children are always given (about how the world is fair, or how those who work hard shall…

If you’ve clicked on any articles about the victims of recent terror attacks, you might have seen a photo of the man above. Following the deadly terrorist attack at Atatürk airport in Istanbul, Turkey, social media users shared his photo, claiming this man was among the 42 people killed. His photo…

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n13/owen-hatherley/one-click-at-a-time

‘To see Nigel Farage there with his desktop flag was to suddenly and irrevocably understand it: the UK is the Gareth Keenan of Europe.’Photograph: Isopix/Rex/Shutterstock I n a crowded field, I think it was the flag that was the killer. The absolute state of that flag. Nigel Farage’s desktop Union…

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2094385-ai-just-got-a-big-boost-in-its-ability-to-understand-the-news/