An NYU graduate student has created the BurritoBot, a robot capable of “printing” edible bean burritos, and you can control the machine with your iPhone. Humanity, we have peaked.
What Happens When It Becomes Self-Aware?
Pictures Made of Words
Pictures made of words: Hang your favorite book on the wall with the complete text, arranged to depict a memorable scene from the book. (via @Harvard_Press)
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Over the Frontier
“I have a happy nature, / But Mother is always sad, / I enjoy every moment of my life, / – Mother has been had.” Saturday got you down? Here are a few brilliant little poems and their accompanying doodles by the late, great Stevie Smith.
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Remembering the Novel
If novels are written to remind us of our mistakes and we keep repeating those mistakes, why read novels at all?, asks Alberto Manguel. Richard Lea discusses authors’ views on the relationship between the novel and memory at The International Forum on the Novel.
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Lateral Moves
What happens when a literary fiction writer tackles YA? If that writer is Sherman Alexie, he produces an award-winning book that rivals the quality of his books in other genres. At the Ploughshares blog, Annie Cardi writes about writers who’ve made this transition, including Alexie, Roddy Doyle and Louise Erdrich. You could also read our survey of high school students on the best YA books of 2013.
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Shirley Jackson in the Woods
The New Yorker has published another recently discovered Shirley Jackson short story “The Man in the Woods,” a fairy tale that takes on some classic mythology. According to her son, it’s one of many new stories found in her archives, and we can expect a new collection next year. “What was surprising to us was not that she was so prolific and had left behind so much unseen work but, rather, the quality of that work,” Laurence Jackson Hyman said.
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Double Take on Double Fold
In his 2001 treatise, Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, Nicholson Baker lamented the wholesale transfer of newspaper archives to microfilm and the subsequent destruction of the originals (A recent essay here at The Millions argued that this is still a big problem). But, according to an article in The Missourian newspaper, microfilm may at least be far more permanent than easily corrupted digital archives. As executive editor Tom Warhover notes: “How about those perfectly preserved newspaper pages that have been digitally fossilized? They’re usually stored on hard drives, which can wear out quicker than your grandmother’s underwear.”
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