Andrew Wylie, the world’s most renowned – and for a long time its most reviled – literary agent, is 76 years old. Over the past four decades, he has reshaped the business of publishing in profound and, some say, insalubrious ways. He has been a champion of highbrow books and unabashed commerce, making many great writers famous and many famous writers rich. In the process, he has helped to define the global literary canon. His critics argue that he has also hastened the demise of the literary culture he claims to defend. Wylie is largely untroubled by such criticisms. What preoccupies him, instead, are the deals to be made in China.
Part of the magic of major literary awards seems to lie in their ceremonial mystery, the way that authors are anointed like popes, with a puff of white smoke emerging from a literary conclave. We are quick to point out that this book was shortlisted for the Pulitzer, or that that author is a Booker Prize winner, but the people who draft those shortlists and select those winners are forgotten long before the gold and silver medallions are even pasted to the covers.
We may never know exactly what happened in the room where literary history was being made. But, thanks to new data on American literary prizes, we now know exactly who was there.
Tablescapes have become a cultural focal point because they’re a visual representation of shifting ideas around how we think about home, entertaining, and pleasure. Arranging a table isn’t just about accessories — it’s about attitude. The way we approach both is changing.
An immigrant newcomer to the fictional megacity of Polis, Slide has marginal employment as an apprentice to two bullying barbers and a tiny room in an apartment with two oddball roommates. Slide’s attempts to improve his standing — find his own apartment, his own shop, maybe a girlfriend — drive this book, which stays entertaining, clever and mysterious throughout its 500 pages.
Imagine an artificial intelligence — perhaps in human form — equipped with a layer of photoreceptors to capture light, a membrane that tracks fluctuations in air pressure, sensors on the body to communicate physical contact, and even some sort of a spectrometer to identify smells and flavors. Assume, too, that the intelligence is capable enough of integrating all this information, and of moving about and behaving as humans do. Would you think it conscious? Is it conscious? Would it see the same blue of the sea that we do, hear the same crash of the waves? Would it respond to an ocean breeze with joy, wistfulness or hope? Or would all of these incoming sensations be “just” information to it, bits and bytes, frequencies and wavelengths?
Science journalist George Musser attempts to answer some of these questions in his book “Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation: Why Physicists Are Studying Human Consciousness and AI to Unravel the Mysteries of the Universe.” He has assembled a vast array of ideas from developments in artificial intelligence, heterodox interpretations of modern physics, and philosophies of science and mind, and has interviewed many of the scientists and philosophers behind these theories. His conclusion? We cannot understand what consciousness is without understanding the fundamental laws of physics; or, depending on whom you ask, the other way around.