Making a Scene
On the AI apocalypse, Cannes, congestion pricing, and NEA funding
Timeless stories from our 175-year archive handpicked to add context to the news of the day.
AI Apocalypse Now?
[July 2024]
“The artificial-intelligence apocalypse is a new fear that keeps many up at night, a terror born of great advances that seem to suggest that, if we are not very careful, we may—with our own hands—bring forth a future where humanity has no place.”
Read “The Gods of Logic” by Benjamín Labatut
[December 2023]
“Never forget the innumerable undergraduate papers being churned out all across America—although these will soon be eliminated by ChatGPT—papers that cite and/or plagiarize Wikipedia; an alien studying our culture might think a key facet of the humanities education in the past decades was the ritual printing out of fragments of our online encyclopedia.”
Read “The Hofmann Wobble” by Ben Lerner
[April 1953]
“Automatic computing machines presage not only varied new developments in science, but a business-office revolution that may cut quite as deep as the nineteenth century's revolution in the factory.”
Read “Electronic Calculators” by Leonard Engel
Dispatch from Cannes
[January 2021]
On the languid pleasures of Nuri Bilge Ceylan, whose film Distant won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2003.
Read “Slow Burn” by Yasmine Seale
[February 1928]
“The pictures, they said, do not represent life; people do not behave in life as do the characters of the movies, and the stories told by the pictures are usually wildly improbable.”
Read “The Riviera” by Lloyd R. Morris
[August 1973]
“For if absolutely nothing but chicanery is assured anymore, then the Cannes Film Festival is still where the producers come to spawn in the springtime.”
Read “Porn in the Sun” by Mordecai Richler
[February 1965]
“They are labeled unfriendly by Hollywood and prize-crazy by the cinema huffs—but to a cool outsider’s eye they look both zany and glamorous.”
Read “The Annual Rites at Cannes” by Arthur Meier Schlesinger
Heavy Traffic: On congestion pricing
[June 2014]
On the lost glory of America’s railroads.
Read “21st Century Limited” by Kevin Baker
[November 1958]
“Our national transportation system is in one hell of a mess.”
Read “Unsnarling Traffic” by John I. Snyder Jr.
[December 2004]
Doom and romance on a subway platform.
Read “Speak, Hoyt-Schermerhorn” by Jonathan Lethem
[April 1957]
“Downtown traffic congestion can be eased only by making it possible for people to come in without cars.”
Read “A Better Deal for Commuters” by George Alpert
Art of War: On NEA funding
[December 1990]
“Politics has always been very much what the NEA is about, and it has been Frohnmayer's job to make the politics of the NEA conform to those currently obtaining in Washington.”
Read “Funds for the Enfeebled” by Vince Passaro
[September 1981]
On the paradox of patronage.
Read “Money and Art” by Paul Theroux
[August 1980]
“Defining what is moral and what is beautiful in the ‘humanities’ and ‘public policy’ requires ‘interpretation,’ of course, and definitions will naturally differ…”
Read “The Ministry of Culture” by Michael Macdonald Mooney