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Cornelis Cort, The Last Judgment Triptych, engraving on laid paper, plate: 33.5 × 49.2 cm (13 3/16 × 19 3/8 in.) sheet: 37.5 × 52.1 cm (14 3/4 × 20 1/2 in.), 1570 1560, https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.52407.html. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington OpenAI have just released two new models, 'o1-preview' and 'o1-mini'—both of which are in preview, in spite of the name of the later model—and I think there are a …

The Cari Vander Yacht illustrations of people distracted by reading that accompany the New Yorker‘s announcement of the 2024 National Book Awards longlists are really lovely. The animated versions on the site are really nice too.

❚ MOST OF US have fond memories of Blue Rondo a la Turk, the seven-piece jazz/salsa band created by Chris Sullivan in 1981 and their first album Chewing the Fat, which I still consider the most original album of 1982. … Continue reading →

Is Small Still Beautiful? Last month’s newsletter drew the usual postbag: thoughts, assertions, random abuse (thanks Mum). But amongst the odds and sods in the LBC inbox, one London brewery worker’s email stood out. It was written in response to the predictable beer lists at London stadia and at Cahoots, a 1940s pub in Soho, and the wider post-Covid problem of bar space being monopolised by multinational beers:

Read Part 1 HERE Adrienne Barbeau: A Bold New Chapter in 70s Television: In the 1970s, television actors like Adrienne Barbeau faced significant barriers when transitioning to feature films; no one would consider hiring you, as the prevailing mindset was – why would audiences pay the price of a movie ticket to see an actor … Continue reading Grease To Grit: The Unforgettable Journey of Adrienne Barbeau -Part 2 Including …

Peter Kennard: Archive of Dissent at the Whitechapel Gallery is a retrospective of 50 years of radical image making. 'attempt to express that outrage by ripping through the mask, by cutting, tearing, montaging and juxtaposing imagery we are bombarded with daily. It shows what lies behind the mask' the victims, the resistance, the human communality saying no to corporate and state power'His work was very much the most striking visual …

Around July of this year, my site threw a strange error while deploying. Usually I would spend a while googling how to fix it so I carry on as I was. But I was growing dissatisfied with my static site generator Jekyll anyway, so I threw the whole site out and rebuilt it using a different program called Eleventy. It's still a work in progress but it does most of …

Cover art by Atun Purser My article on organized labor in the 1940s and ’50s science fiction of Clifford D. Simak went live! I’d love to hear your thoughts. I’ve spent the last half year researching and reading religiously for this project–from topics such as Minnesota’s unique brand of radical politics to the work of contemporary intellectuals like C. Wright Mills (1916-1962) whom Simak most likely read. Please check out …

This post was written as a walking thought and it’s not quite well structured. I’m just trying to put my ideas into words. Come back to this blog post in a few years and see if this was right or wrong. Introduction Today before taking a walk, I observe my phone and I received a notification: you mail has been leaked. I was like, “Well, that’s not good”, to just …

OpenAI (who owns ChatGPT) released a new model today. It is called o1. The main difference between models like 4o is it inherently performs chain of thought reasoning when producing an answer. What is chain of thought reasoning? Well, it shows you how it came to the result it did. This makes the model more accurate and also shows you how it got to where it did with its answer. …

Humour, however, belongs very much to the world. Life is suffering. As Shakamuni pointed out long ago, we cannot have what we want, and we must have what we don’t want, but humour is not escapist. It overcomes the world, not by ascending to heaven, but by laughing at the paradoxes of life. We overcome the world by laughing at it; we overcome it in so far as we laugh …

We no longer have to either suffer with the corporate Internet created by big tech or walk away entirely. The small Internet provides another option.

Was everyone who was searching for the 'Second Summer Of Love' looking in entirely the wrong place?

Following the global success of mega-hit Six was always going to be a challenge. Why Am I So Single? is the new show from Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, a “big fancy musical” that celebrates… More

A digression and some advice: Instead of writing a post about burnout or any complaint you might have about your job or AI or people's terrible taste, go outside. Take a walk.Take a drive to your nearest city. Go to a public park. Walk in a neighborhood you've never visited before. Sit at a coffee bar. Eat at a cafe. Read a book in public. Talk to a stranger.* Go …