As a weekly columnist for a 140-year-old newspaper, I’m an endangered species. I’m like a steak, cooking backwards: rarer by the second. More so now that the run of my column is being halved. There was a contraction in the newsroom. The afterbirth is, as Terry Gilliam might say, “100 percent more Less.” Ever hear…
Those of a certain generation may recall Herb Caen, the erstwhile?San Francisco Chronicle?columnist who anchored the Macy’s ad next to his daily forays into what he called ?three dot journalism.? I never met Caen but my mother, when a bank VP, retained his services as an on-call personality. This was during the rollicking ?90s when…
Writers who fear that computers will someday displace them may shudder to learn that the machines won’t just write the books, they will read them too. In recent months, both researchers and literary critics are harnessing computational power to ‘read? books in an effort to divine qualities human writers and readers haven’t the bandwidth to…
When I first learned about Chicago-based Narrative Science, the smallest, weakest part of my ego caught flame and soon an inferno of doubt engulfed my every thought. The firm’s artificial intelligence algorithms combine “business analytics” and “natural language communication” in a manner that makes raw data easily consumable. Basically, they’ve taught robots to write news…
Because you have nothing better to do on All Saints Day, here’s a selection of the opening credits of The Saint, a Brit TV spy thriller starring a pre-Bond Roger Moore as a suave modern Robin Hood known as Simon Templar. He is described by his creator, author Leslie Charteris, as a “buccaneer in the…
23-year-old Orson Welles put the me in mea culpa when he apologized for his infamous War of the Worlds radio broadcast of the Martian invasion tale.
