Theater and Film

“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 »

"Inspired by Jane Austen’s unfinished final novel, Sanditon is a compelling depiction of a developing Regency seaside town at the forefront of the great social and economic changes of the age. When a carriage accident introduces the young Charlotte Heywood to the Parker family, she embarks on a journey from the only home she has ever known to the seaside idyll of Sanditon. Carried along by the enthusiasm of entrepreneur Tom Parker for the development of the once small fishing village into a fashionable seaside resort, Charlotte quickly finds herself at the heart of a diverse and unexpected community. From the direct but miserly Lady Denham, on whose fortune the Sanditon project relies, to the bitter fight between the numerous relatives hoping to inherit Lady Denham’s money, Charlotte quickly discovers that not everyone is as they first appear. more »

"Could arts engagement have protective associations with survival? We analysed the longitudinal relation between receptive arts engagement and mortality across a 14 year follow-up period in a nationally representative sample of adults aged 50 and older. Risk of dying at any point during the follow-up period among people who engaged with cultural activities on an infrequent basis (once or twice a year) was 14% lower than in those with no engagement; for those who engaged on a frequent basis (every few months or more), the risk was 31% lower." more »

Joan L. Cannon writes: Except for the military, men worked at desks and in boardrooms, women did no housekeeping, no childcare, little or no charity work. Like a perfectly arranged workshop, their lives were ordered, with a place for everything (and everyone), and everything in its place. Not many writers could hold modern attentions with such a world, yet it is more real than if it were shown on a movie screen. The characters in their houses, the décor, the customs, the music and art and social events are so meticulously portrayed that the reader is like an eavesdropper.  more »