Jacob Posner in The Christian Science Monitor:
In a YouTube video posted by NASA, kids sit cross-legged in neat rows in a gymnasium at Sunita L. Williams Elementary School in Needham, Massachusetts. You can see them wave their little hands at the camera, which beams the image roughly 250 miles above Earth to the International Space Station. They were talking in December with none other than Sunita Williams, the school’s namesake and an astronaut living on the space station. She should have been home already. A series of technical failures extended an eight-day mission to nine months, leading some news organizations and politicians to play up tension and place blame.
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The new film “Hamnet” features two bright young actors, Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley, playing Shakespeare and his wife, Agnes (née Anne) Hathaway. “Hamnet” arrives already widely lauded — it won the audience award at the Toronto International Film Festival and has been sending millennial cinephiles into critical paroxysms. “Not to be hyperbolic but this movie contains the actual meaning of life,” 
Bibliomania, the only hobby which is also a mental health affliction. The person with piles of titles on their nightstand, in their closet, in the trunk of their car. Books in front of books on their bookshelf. “With thought, patience, and discrimination, book passion becomes the signature of a person’s character,” writes Nicholas Basbanes in A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books. “When out of control and indulged to excess, it lets loose a fury of bizarre behavior.” The sort of figure mocked in the engraving “The Bibliomaniac” from Sebastian Brandt’s 1497 satirical allegory The Ship of Fools, a work that Erasmus knew well, where he may have recognized himself in the woodcut. I certainly do, seeing a reflection of my own bookish pursuits from half-a-millennia ago in Brandt’s ridiculous figure in monastic robes and scholarly cap and eyeglasses, sitting behind a desk and shelf piled with books, the figure fanning them as if he’s their servant rather than they his possessions.
There was a revealing moment recently when Sam Altman appeared on Tucker Carlson’s podcast. Carlson pressed Altman on the moral foundations of ChatGPT. He made the case that the technology has a kind of baseline religious or spiritual component to it, since we assume it’s more powerful than humans and we look to it for guidance. Altman replied that to him there’s nothing spiritual about it. “So if it’s nothing more than a machine and just the product of its inputs,” says Carlson. “Then the two obvious questions are: what are the inputs? What’s the moral framework that’s been put into the technology?”
Alan Moore is 72 years old now. Since the 1980s, he’s been celebrated as the greatest writer in comics history. But he’s done with all that. Full-time novelist now. Finally. Spends his days at home just writing, reading, and smoking “frightening,” “staggering,” “saturating” amounts of weed.
While AI bubble talk 
In that classic of Western cinema, Monty Python’s Life of Brian, the title character addresses a crowd in Jerusalem that has mistaken him for Jesus Christ. “You’ve got it all wrong,” he pleads. “You don’t need to follow me. You don’t need to follow anybody. You’ve got to think for yourselves. You’re all individuals!” The crowd chants back, in unison, “Yes, we’re all individuals!” “You’re all different!” Brian protests. “Yes, we’re all different!” the crowd responds (though one lone voice insists, “I’m not”).
Last summer, a few American writer friends and I traveled across China on a self-organized tour of AI labs, factories, and industrial clusters. Among them was Aadil, a twenty-two-year-old Bay Area engineer who loves the Cantonese rapper 
Two actors are wriggling across the stage on their bellies. They’re earthworms, or maybe simply brothers, Cricket and Coyote, who want to become earthworms. They’re planning to write a screenplay together, and one suggests making their movie about worms. But “I thought we were writing something about what it means to come from the same root,” the other brother complains. “A movie, a Western, brothers killing men and running amuck in the desert.”
From her early documentary Indian Cabaret (1985), which follows strippers through Mumbai, to her first feature film, Salaam Bombay (1988), which centers the lives of street children, to Mississippi Masala (1991), which explores prejudice between Black and Indian communities in the U.S., to Queen of Katwe (2016), which gives a glimpse into the life of Ugandan chess prodigy Phiona Mutesi, Nair has built a career on surfacing brilliant, if often overlooked, stories. Her devotion to getting into the particularities and specificities of culture, for not being swayed by an invisible audience that executives insist might not get it, has earned her a loyal following. It’s also gotten her an Academy Award nomination and the Cannes Prix d’Or and Audience Award for Salaam Bombay, the Golden Lion award for Monsoon Wedding at the Venice Film Festival, and many other prizes. It is no surprise to any of us that a son raised in her household would engender the same loyalty.
The names ‘dove’ and ‘pigeon’ can be deceptive. Scientifically speaking, neither of them carry much merit. All the birds we know as either pigeons or doves belong to the same family, Columbidae. This large group of often plump, slender-billed birds encompasses around 350 species, with five regularly found in the UK.
In 1907, US historian Henry Adams first started circulating a memoir that would go on to be a smash hit in 1919: The Education of Henry Adams. Given Adams’s illustrious family – both his grandfather and great-grandfather were presidents – you might expect it to be a self-congratulatory tale of the wonders of US education.
The development of better and more reliable artificial intelligence (AI) technologies has immense applications in the field of scientific research. AI has become a powerful extra set of eyes and hands for scientists: It can sift through heaps of data in seconds, guide experiments, and help write better manuscripts. “We’re seeing the emergence of subdisciplines that are AI plus X, where X is essentially every field of science. Neuroscience is no exception,” said 
Hal Hartley does have a new movie out. His first feature since Ned Rifle (2014), the conclusion of the Henry Fool trilogy. Did you know that? I suspect that either you did not know that or have known it for so long that you now suspect I am a poser. (That’s what shibboleth-speakers call people who have gained, but not earned, access to the shibboleth. Tedious, but it comes with the territory.) It’s called Where to Land, he paid for it via Kickstarter—as he has for his projects since Ned Rifle—and I doubt a large audience will see it. Hartley produces and sells his own box-sets and offers his movies via streaming on his