Noam Chomsky: The False Promise of ChatGPT | The New York Times

The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer to a scientific question. On the contrary, the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information; it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations.

The Twitter I Love Doesn’t Exist Anymore | The Atlantic

I asked Guinz what she truly thought about the Twitter sunset. She said she wasn’t quite ready to jump to an alternative platform like Mastodon. “I’m leaving it the way I have all my toxic relationships,” she later wrote to me by email. “Slowly, head down, curtseying in reverse toward the door.”

Review: The Many Thrilling Flavors of a Full-Scale ‘Sweeney Todd’ | The New York Times

Under Alex Lacamoire’s musical supervision, the musicians’ performance, like that of the ensemble in the choral numbers, is glorious.

The Man Who Leaked the Pentagon Papers Is Scared | The New York Times

Micro.blog March photo challenge, photo 27: “Support” (Atwater Village, CA)

Nick Cave on the Fragility of Life | The New Yorker

The creative process—especially original creation, which, for me, is writing words and music—can feel like hard labor and much of the time is as far away from anything you might call spiritual. I find it can be an agonizing and debilitating and solitary business. But there are sudden mystifying moments of spiritual freedom, where I am lifted from my feelings of inadequacy and I am suddenly flying around the room like a giggling fool, rapturously transported. That’s not just the creative process—that’s life in general. We lead our common lives, but all around there are hunches and intimations and whisperings of something else. These small, softly spoken suggestions are enough for me to feel that there is some enigmatic otherness to be experienced, and that’s where my belief lies.

Review: A Contemporary Music Group’s Next Era Begins | The New York Times

It sounds like there’s a lot going on here. But while undeniably jam-packed and charged with grave themes, the evening progressed with a sense of unhurried equanimity. That was in large part thanks to the figure cut by [Douglas R.] Ewart; when he paced the stage to grab a new instrument, you could hear bells — tucked away in the pockets of his colorful, homemade concert suit — jangling peaceably.

Radio By Diane di Prima | The New Yorker

In Hasidic Judaism
it is said that before we
are born an angel
enters the womb,
strikes us on the
mouth
and we forget all
that we knew of
previous lives—
all that we know
of heaven

How the Graphic Designer Milton Glaser Made America Cool Again | The New Yorker