The Above Average team animated an adaptation of George Saunders’s Syracuse University commencement speech, “The Importance of Kindness.” (You can read the original over here.) The speech has since been expanded, and it was published this past week.
“As a goal in life, you could do worse than ‘try to be kinder.'”
A Bombing Hits Home
Recommended Reading: On the recent terrorist attacks in Ankara, and longing for home.
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A New Award for the Promotion of Irish Literature
A new laureateship award worth €150,000 was created by Ireland's Arts Council in conjunction with University College Dublin and New York University. The award will be given to "an outstanding Irish writer of fiction" with hopes that the author will "promote [Irish] literature around the world" and "inspire the public to engage with the best Irish fiction." The first appointment will be made in 2014.
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Faking It
Photography was fake long before Photoshop came into the picture.
Our young robot overlords
Looks like our robot overlord is going to be a 13-year-old boy: the Turing Test has been passed for the first time by a bot simulating a preteen, making history for artificial intelligence research and teenagers alike. "Our main idea was that he can claim that he knows anything, but his age also makes it perfectly reasonable that he doesn't know everything," researchers explained.
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“It is not enough to have his idea.”
Recommended Reading: Four poems by Darin Ciccotelli are up at BOMB.
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Elizabeth Gilbert’s Ex-Husband Can also Write a Memoir
The former Mrs. Elizabeth Gilbert--that is, Michael Cooper, the husband Gilbert left at the opening of Eat Pray Love, has apparently written a book about his life after their divorce. Will it ever be published?
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Shriver on Kids, Movies
We once wondered if Lionel Shriver is America's best writer, and she once shared with us her love for William Trevor. In an interview with The Atlantic, she talks about not having kids and says the adaptation of We Need to Talk about Kevin "is a far better film than I had any reason to expect them to be able to make."
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