January 7, 2014 On the Shelf Siri Hates Her, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring HAL 9000—still the standard-bearer for baneful artificial intelligences. Eschewing received wisdom and millions of high school syllabi, one writer dares to contend that Charlotte Brontë’s Villette trumps Jane Eyre. Spike Jonze wrote the screenplay for Her, which features a honey-tongued operating system named Samantha, well before Siri came into this world—but surely you can see the connection. Siri can’t. Ask her about Her and you’ll get some guff: “I think she gives artificial intelligence a bad name.” As the New York Times prepares to debut its new home page, this helpful gif shows how the site has evolved since 2001. (“The New York Times on the Web,” it said then—as if to congratulate itself for having arrived.) Fan art for The Catcher in the Rye. Highest honors go to that left-handed fielder’s mitt. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince becomes an art exhibit.
January 6, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent Love in a Cold Climate By Sadie Stein Photo: Sebastian Dooris I moved to Greenpoint, in North Brooklyn, on the heels of a breakup, and although I lived there for years, in my memories it is always somehow winter. While I was hardly a pioneer in the neighborhood—a recognizable mumblecore actor lived one fire escape away—ten years ago it was still a far cry from today’s full-on Girls-level gentrification; friends still griped about taking the unreliable G train to come visit, and more than one said that the rent had better be pretty cheap to justify the schlep. It was. To those who know the area, this was just off of Monsignor McGolrick Park, a twelve-minute walk from the Nassau Avenue station. At first glance the apartment was unprepossessing, but after I had pulled up the stained carpet, painted the walls a vivid blue, found a copper leaf sculpture at a thrift store, and sewn a gaily-patterned bark-cloth curtain to separate the bedroom, I fancied it was cheerful, in a vaguely retro-modern way. There was also a fire escape large enough for a table and chairs, not to mention a few pots of nasturtiums and some basil in the summer, even though, again, my primary memories involve snow. I had chosen the neighborhood because it was one of the few where I could both afford to live alone on my shopgirl salary and also feel safe walking alone at night. But I had not been living there long when I met M., and he kind of just moved in by osmosis. It was never a formal arrangement, but I didn’t like going to his roommate-filled bachelor pad three trains away, and we were young enough that this sort of thing seemed normal. Read More
January 6, 2014 Bulletin Our New Year’s Resolution: Spend More Time with the Kids By Dan Piepenbring As truisms go, “They grow up so fast” is a doozy. Take it from us. A mere fifteen years ago, when The Paris Review was a sprightly forty-five, we looked on in wonder as McSweeney’s took its first steps in this world, a mock eighteenth-century gazette from the outskirts of Silicon Valley. At moments we glimpsed a younger, friendlier version of ourselves, if we’d been born in a small nonsmoking city where people did graphic design. We laughed at their jokes. We admired the typesetting. We even paid a couple of visits to their pirate store. What can we say? Time did its thing. We remained on the East Coast, McSweeney’s on the West. As the years passed, we begged off various ballet recitals, countless soccer games, and at least one fiction reading that had an acoustic guitar component. We were an absentee elder sister. No more! With a new year upon us and McSweeney’s entering its headstrong teenage phase, we want a second chance: at the ripe old age of sixty, we’re spending more time with the kid. All month long, we’re offering a subscription deal in conjunction with McSweeney’s: you can get both magazines for just $75, a 20 percent savings. Because it’s 2014, and you don’t have to make the same mistakes we did. You can have it all: the interviews, fiction, poetry, art, essays, humor, and translations that make us proud to be in the same business.
January 6, 2014 Arts & Culture Recapping Dante: Canto 12, or A Concerned Parent Contacts the FCC By Alexander Aciman Gustave Doré, Canto XII, lines 73, 74. This winter, we’re recapping the Inferno. Read along! To whom it may concern: For the last several months my child has been watching the program The Inferno. I’ve had concerns about the moral integrity of this show since the beginning, but a recent episode, “Canto 12: Dante with a Vengeance” is perhaps the worst of it. The episode, which I heard about from my son and then felt concerned enough to watch myself, begins as the two main characters meet a Minotaur. I’m not trying to have my son indoctrinated with pagan dogma. I mean, what is this? I’ll let my son watch a show about talking vegetables so long as they’re telling the stories of Christ, but there’s something so frighteningly glib about the mythological image of a Minotaur being placed in front of children. Is no one worried about the future of American youth? And while we’re on it, let’s talk about these Virgil and Dante fellows. There’s something going on there, and I can tell you exactly what: sin. But it gets worse. As the two sodomites (let’s call them what they are) travel past the creature, they’re surrounded by a series of centaurs. And I’ll tell you the exact same thing I told the executives at Warner Brothers when the fifth Harry Potter film had a scene with centaurs. The centaur is obviously a product of sin. And animal cruelty. Allow me to set my faith aside for a minute, because the worst of The Inferno is not in its hunger for blasphemy. This is the work of a very, very sick mind. “Canto 12” prominently features a river of boiling blood in which the sinners are confined. Should they pop their heads too high, the centaurs pelt them with arrows. The whole scene is very graphic, and the blood looks very real. How do you even come up with that? Read More
January 6, 2014 Bulletin, Our Daily Correspondent Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes By Sadie Stein Dear friends, There are going to be some exciting things happening here at the Daily! For starters, after nearly two years of editing the site, I’m going to be shifting my focus to writing: as a contributing editor and sort of house writer, I’ll now be appearing here on a daily (no pun intended) basis! As to the editorial side, I’m delighted to hand things over to Dan Piepenbring, who has graciously made the westward trek to lend TPR his talents, smarts, and musical acumen. (One of these days I’ll actually get all my perfume bottles, matchbooks, and ink bottles out of his desk.) Watch this space to see the wonders he works. As ever, Sadie
January 6, 2014 On the Shelf Martin Amis Owes Everything to His “Wicked Stepmother,” and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Photography: Maximilian Schönherr, via Wikimedia Commons. Martin Amis pays elegant tribute to his deceased stepmother, who saved him from an early life as “a semi-literate truant.” Chang-rae Lee’s forthcoming On Such a Full Sea boasts the world’s first 3D-printed book cover. How to modernize literary classics (even when cell phones and the Internet bring an infestation of plot holes). Can great literature really change your life? (Quick answer: probably not, but maybe.)