Robots have sparked a lot of debate about the future of artificial intelligence. Just how smart do we want robots to become, some ask, and what are the implications? Similar questions are raised when it comes to the appearances of intelligent machines—just how human do we want robots to look?
In this way, Earth Room asks large questions in an understated voice — how to grieve and how to love, how to be a family and how to understand place. For answers, she turns to art, questioning the lines we draw between performance and life. Does the speaker give us definite answers? Certainly not — we must come to them ourselves, but she’s here alongside, encouraging, reminding us in the final poem that we are “very very very very / very very close.”
The memoir of a bookseller, poet, travel writer and essayist from Ontario who found his way to England by way of several jobs, A Factotum in the Book Trade is cranky, obscure, charming, occasionally antiquarian in its assessment of contemporary social and political life, and illuminating. It reads like a used bookstore smells. Perhaps Kociejowski would hate that simile but for many a book collector – or hoarder, accumulator, maven, avid reader, or whatever you please – it is high praise. Go open this book and see where it takes you.
As a science consultant for the forthcoming film Jurassic World Dominion, Brusatte has nothing against dinosaurs, and the shelves of his office are teeming with sketches, plastic models and even origami creations of the beasts.
The effusive American even began as a T rex expert before branching out into studying mammal fossils. But there’s a simple reason why he’s so passionate about the latter. As he says in his new book: “Dinosaurs are awesome, but they are not us.”