Daily Cartoon: Wednesday, June 18th

The Friendship Challenge | The New Yorker

“I don’t really know how competitive I am by nature, because if you can’t consciously acknowledge something you can’t see where you are in relation to it.” I wrote this sentence to an acquaintance with whom I was having a long e-mail exchange about Elena Ferrante’s novel “My Brilliant Friend,” which follows the early phase […]

Under the Radar Keeps Rollin’ Along

When Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II first adapted Edna Ferber’s epic novel “Show Boat” for the stage, in the nineteen-twenties, they were the wild-eyed experimenters of their day. The American musical before 1927 had been light stuff—part operetta, part revue—a merry playground for sparklers like George M. Cohan and Cole Porter. Hammerstein and Kern, […]

Has the Robotics Revolution Arrived?

In today’s newsletter, James Somers on how robots learn. And then: “This is the year that people really realized that you can build general-purpose robots,” Carolina Parada, the leader of the robotics team at Google DeepMind, said recently.Illustration by Tameem Sankari A Revolution in How Robots Learn A future generation of robots will not be […]