Training robots?
LinkedIn advertises quite a few job opportunities in the “AI training” area. Please, fellow writers, don’t squander your hard-earned human skill on robots! Writing is a way for humans to discover, invent and evolve,...
Category: creativity
it’s everywhere. art has no particular claim.
Luigi Ghirri: The Complete Essays 1973-1991. Book Review
I had already read a few of these essays when I realised that no one would try to persuade me that photography “records” or “represents” reality. A reader is credited from the start, that...
Humans Typing Fast
This morning, I gave myself a classic typing test. There was a reason. I won’t claim it was a good one, but we’ll get to that. It concerned a job I learned about yesterday...
Mild Vertigo: Book Review
Mieko Kanai: Mild Vertigo (translator, Polly Barton), London: Fitzarraldo, 2023. I found many reasons to admire it. Prime among them was the consistency of language — and translation — that makes it possible for...
The Melody of Language
If language is like music, surely translators are in the best position to notice it, and to respond, whether with joy or foreboding. Probably all of us hear it. There’s a particular beat, a...
Absence of Mind: Book Review
Marilynne Robinson, Absence of Mind, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010. If you’re reading Robinson’s essays, you probably have already read her novels. You may well approach the essays as I did,...