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“Alexa is one more way for Amazon to gather extremely valuable data,” Meredith Whittaker, co-director of the A.I. Now Institute at NYU. “And this data collection is extremely important to this business model. It’s extremely hard to do … convincing people to just deploy something like this in their home is — it’s a brilliant trick.” It’s one that’s helping Amazon in a quest to dominate the future — not just of commerce, but also artificial intelligence. “Amazon wants to have the entire environment, essentially miked … All these intimacies, all this insight is being integrated, analyzed and integrated. That is an extraordinary kind of power that has never before existed.” more »

Six months before he died in poverty and obscurity, architect and draftsman Jean Jacques Lequeu (1757– 1826) donated more than 800 drawings, one of the most singular and fascinating graphic oeuvres of his time, to the French Royal Library. Lequeu’s donation of more than 800 architectural drawings, letters, manuscripts and physiognomic studies to the Royal Library in Paris created a paper legacy that has confounded scholars ever since. more »

Ferida Wolff writes: "Sometimes there is ice on the morning windshield and by afternoon jackets aren’t needed. Snow may be predicted but we haven’t seen a snowstorm yet. One day the wind was so aggressive that it moved things sideways. Another day was so foggy that it was hard to see beyond a few feet. The weather has been puzzling for a while now." And another source: "Solving jigsaw puzzles is a low-cost, intrinsically motivating, cognitive leisure activity, which can be executed alone or with others and without the need to operate a digital device." more »

Titles include: The Roots of Rap: 16 Bars on the 4 Pillars of Hip Hop by Carole Boston Weatherford, a picture book that traces the history and heroes of rap and hip hop; Pet, the fantasy novel for teens by Akwaeke Emezi; the soon-to-be adapted for television Normal People by Sally Rooney; Library of Small Catastrophes, a book of poetry by Alison C. Robbins; and a picture book about a father-daughter motorcycle ride Mi Papi Tiene Una Moto by Isabel Quintero and Zeke Peña. (Editor's Note: Don't forget the NYPL book Peculiar Questions and Practical Answers, A Little Book of Whimsy and Wisdom from the Files of the New York Public Library ... see illustration)   more »