Plus: Berenice Abbott, AI, Sheila Heti
| Muslim religious leaders in the US need to navigate the demands of a secularizing, pluralistic, and Islamophobic country. Several new institutions are emerging to train them. “Chatbot ‘writing’ has a bland, regurgitated quality. Textures are flattened, sharp edges are sanded. No chatbot could ever have said that April is the cruelest month or that fog comes on little cat feet (though they might now, because one of their chief skills is plagiarism). And when synthetically extruded text turns out wrong, it can be comically wrong. When a movie fan asked Google whether a certain actor was in Heat, he received this ‘AI Overview’: ‘No, Angelina Jolie is not in heat.’” “Putting troops on the streets of Los Angeles is a training exercise for the army, a form of reorientation. Soldiers are being retrained for loyalty to the president rather than the Constitution.” “Sheila Heti’s prose is more distinctive and charismatic than her critics acknowledge. Its rhythms and repetitions give her writing an unusual atmosphere—mystical and tender, with comedy usually hovering in the background, as in a children’s book.” Free from the ArchivesThe photographer Berenice Abbott was born 127 years ago today. In June 2023 Nawal Arjini wrote for the Review about the genesis of Abbott’s first book, Changing New York (1939), “a representation of the growing city” that Abbott originally hoped would demonstrate how the masses of New Yorkers interact with—and influence—the dense mechanical environment of their city, and that eventually became one of the most famous collections of twentieth-century photographs of New York City architecture. “Abbott’s camera is capable of both might and precision; elsewhere, [her partner Elizabeth] McCausland describes it almost as a creature in its own right, with its own particular urges.... At the same time, it is drawn to its mechanical kin, especially metal in all its forms: trains, trolleys, water tanks, wrought-iron fences, fire escapes, bridges.” Save $168 on an inspired pairing!
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