Reviews and News:
“Fleming, Tolkien and C.S. Lewis are the authors that people most claim—falsely—to have read.”
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Smart cities are going to be a security nightmare.
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Why have free online translators improved so much recently? Google.
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How algorithms are changing legal judgements: “When Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. visited Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute last month, he was asked a startling question, one with overtones of science fiction. ‘Can you foresee a day,’ asked Shirley Ann Jackson, president of the college in upstate New York, ‘when smart machines, driven with artificial intelligences, will assist with courtroom fact-finding or, more controversially even, judicial decision-making?’ The chief justice’s answer was more surprising than the question. ‘It’s a day that’s here,’ he said, ‘and it’s putting a significant strain on how the judiciary goes about doing things.’ He may have been thinking about the case of a Wisconsin man, Eric L. Loomis, who was sentenced to six years in prison based in part on a private company’s proprietary software.”
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James Panero on The Whitney’s identity problem.
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Luther and music: “He recognised, says [Lucy] Winkett, ‘that music is the language of the human spirit’ and because of that he got everyone singing in Saxony. Four hours of music each week was introduced into the school curriculum and choirs sprang up in every town.”
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Alan Jacobs on agency and machines.
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Peter Augustine Lawler introduces the first issue of Modern Age under his editorship: “Modern Age will continue to be very, very short on charts and data, and it’s not a place where sentences begin with ‘studies show’.”
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Essay of the Day:
In Time, Nash Jenkins writes about Otto Warmbier, the University of Virginia student who is still imprisoned in North Korea for supposedly stealing propaganda from his hotel for his Methodist church back home. Does anyone care?
There are five flights a week from Pyongyang to Beijing by Air Koryo, North Korea’s state airline, and the earliest leaves at 8:20 on Saturday mornings. If you’re one of the several hundred American tourists who defy their State Department’s official warning and travel to the authoritarian hermit state each year, this will easily get you to the Chinese capital in time for one of several afternoon flights stateside.
The morning of Jan. 2, 2016, was foggy and cold. The night before, a meteorologist on the state-controlled Korean Central Television said that temperatures the following afternoon might climb to the mid-40s (around 7°C)—a balmy respite after a bitter, snowy week—but at dawn, when Otto Warmbier was heading from the Yanggakdo International Hotel to Sunan International Airport, 18 miles north, thermostats in the capital hovered just above freezing.
Warmbier, who had turned 21 three weeks prior, was a junior at the University of Virginia (UVA). He was one of 20 foreigners on a trip organized by Young Pioneer Tours, a travel company based in China and staffed by a coterie of chummy Brits and Aussies who arrange, in their words, tours to ‘destinations your mother would rather you stayed away from.’ They offer package tours to Afghanistan and Turkmenistan, but really, folks come for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), as the North is formally called. The totalitarian hermit kingdom exists in the imagination of many as inscrutable and thrillingly dangerous.
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“Warmbier said that a day before his departure, he had attempted to steal propaganda signage from a staff-only area at his hotel, in a scheme implausibly devised by a Methodist church in his hometown, a secret society at the University of Virginia, and the United States government.
“‘Please, people in the government of the DPR Korea, I beg that you see how I was used and manipulated,’ he said, his voice breaking into sobs. ‘I have made the single worst decision of my life. But I am only human. I beg that you find it in your hearts to allow me to return home to my family.’ He also praised North Korea’s ‘humanitarian treatment of severe criminals’ like himself and in the course of his 35-minute address described Pyongyang as ‘an Eastern Jerusalem.’
“Two and a half weeks later, following a trial that lasted less than an hour, Warmbier was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor. Since then, he has been held at an undisclosed location.”
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Photos: Cygnus supply ship in setting sun above Earth
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Poem: Sam Sax, “On Alcohol”
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