October 14, 2019vigotsocial

The New Yorker 2019 highlights

14 October 2019

  • Discovered that Slack is investing in print ads (initially thought it was some sort of medicine for transit)

Slack-print-ad

  • The Next Word – Where will predictive text take us? My take on the seminal article articulating the history AI in simple terms including how Gmail Smart compose works, how Grammarly was founded and the experiment with OpenAI on “Can a Machine Learn to Write for The New Yorker?”. Yes the one with the “tiny cows”

3 June 2019

  • Smell-o-vision: Ron Winnegrad’s map to help his fragrance students learn how to identify smells.

‘Synesthesia’ comes from the Greek for ‘to perceive together,’. “So you use one sense to describe another sense. Some people who have synesthesia will see each letter of the alphabet as a different color.

Emily Nussbaum highlights how creators are visibly adjusting to and at times struggling with the changing landscape (some have merely “hung a lamp on it” – the writers’-room term for pointing to a problem instead of fixing it), listing: “Tuca and Bertie” (Netflix), “Fosse / Verdon” (FX), “Good Trouble” and “The Bold Type” (Freeform), “Brooklyn Nine-Nine”, “Barry”. They go back to 1989 with “A Different World”, “General Hospital”, “M*A*S*H”, “Cheers”, “The Sopranos” 2001 episode. And more recent shows “Fleabag”, “BoJack Horseman”, “GLOW”, “Veep”, “Great News”, “You’re The Worst”, “Catastrophe”, “The Other Two”, “Good Trouble”, “Jane the Virgin”, “Younger”, “The Good Fight”, “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”, “High Maintenance”.

That’s nearly 50% of the shows I watch or haven’t seen 🙂

It reminded me of her 2017’s not a top 10 list of best TV shows which made me discover Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Big Little Lies, GLOW and Jane the Virgin. It helps for updating My List on Netflix and I’ve just stumbled upon her 2018 not-top-ten which added Succession, The Americans, Killing Eve to my personal list of consistently great(s)! The Good Fight, Jane the Virgin, GLOW, The Good Place, Dear White People, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Queer Eye new seasons were good (not great); American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace and Private Life with the ever-wonderful Paul Giamatti were also worth it.

Not a fan of BoJack Horseman though (Sorry) and still need to catch The End of The F**ing World and High Maintenance.

And, I loved and still love This is Us (sorry to disagree Emily), Billions, Grace & Frankie, The Crown, Sex Education, Black-ish, Fresh off the boat, Getting on, Silicon Valley, Downton Abbey (which are missing) and like you also hated The Marvelous Mrs Maisel (she got on my nerves).

20 May 2019 – The Innovators issue

  • Cool-dad Dept – Good stories. I’ve finally recently started watching Veep from HBO and it is hilarious. This short story on Jonah (Timothy Simons) was the final push to convince me
  • Machine Yearning – My take on Holly Herndon’s search for a new art form for our tech obsessions

22 April 2019

18 March 2019

  • Athleisure time: Discovering Outdoor Voices #doingthings, the new hype Lululemon, that we don’t have here in Singapore. Love the ethos of “Doing things is better than not doing things”. But how can you be “inclusive” when 95% of your tank tops are all cropped, revealing tummy fat which is exactly why you exercise in the first place?

Just search images on Google and voila 

Oh and update in March 2020:

The Anniversary Issue 18-25 Feb 2019 was disappointing this year. Nothing stood out