Vauhini Vara at The Believer:
And yet the most surprising aspect of the tiny-house phenomenon might be that, while the lifestyle has never been more visible, real-life tiny-house dwellers are hard to find. Fewer than ten thousand of the homes are estimated to exist nationwide. The impracticalities of tiny living—shoebox-sized sinks, closetless rooms—can be daunting, but it’s not only that. There are also legal obstacles. In most states, houses built on a foundation must be at least 400 square feet. To get around that, builders have taken to putting tiny houses on wheels and building them to the less restrictive codes that apply to RVs. But many states and cities bar RVs from being parked in one place year-round. Also, when you buy a tiny house, the house is all you get; you have to either buy the land to put it on, use someone else’s for free, or find a landlord willing to lease land to you.
Around the time of LaBarre and Fredell’s entrepreneurial gambit, the discrepancy between the realities of tiny living and its on-screen representations had generated a great deal of confusion. Inspired by HGTV and Pinterest, people would set out to buy tiny houses, only to learn that tiny living, in the real world, is supremely hard.
more here.
In June 2007, in Seville, Spain, a conference was held under the banner “New Fictioneers: The Spanish Literary Atlas.” Around forty writers and critics came together at the Andalusian Center for Contemporary Art to discuss the conservatism they felt to be suffocating their national literature. United in their belief that the Spanish novel in particular was in a bad state, they pointed to a disregard for the increasing centrality of digital media in people’s lives and a knee-jerk resistance to anything that smacked of formal experimentation. They were mostly of a similar age, born in the twilight of the Franco regime, committed to the DIY punk ethos of the fledgling blogosphere, and more likely to claim lineage to J. G. Ballard or Jean Baudrillard than any garlanded compatriots of their own. Nonetheless, the only true point of agreement on the day was that they were not part of a unified movement. The conference’s inaugural address itself rejected any suggestion of a coherent generation—a commonplace criticism familiar in Spain ever since the clumping together, at the end of the nineteenth century, of the Generation of ’98. Within a few weeks, however, an article appeared dubbing these writers “The Nocilla Generation”: the most significant literary phenomenon of Spain’s democratic era now had a label, and it stuck.
Complexities 
I promised God and some other responsible characters, including a bench of bishops, that I was not going to part my lips concerning the U.S. Supreme Court decision on ending segregation in the public schools of the South. But since a lot of time has passed and no one seems to touch on what to me appears to be the most important point in the hassle, I break my silence just this once. Consider me as just thinking out loud.
A contemporary truism, ironically enough, is that we now live in a “post-truth” era, as attested by a number of recent books with 
In October of 1859, Abraham Lincoln received an invitation to come to New York to deliver a lecture at the Abolitionist minster Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn. 
47-year old Teburoro Tito stood at the head of his delegation on an island way out in the Pacific Ocean. At the stroke of midnight on January 1
Of all the internet’s uses, attractions and conveniences, the foremost is that it involves us immediately with an indefinite number of others. Its decisive edge over television and the printed word is just this: its participatory, social character. To the extent that it is becoming our chief means of private and public discourse, it is therefore acquiring exceptional political significance. To someone who understood nothing of the internet, much of contemporary American political life would be inscrutable. It is now our primary way of dealing with each other, our most important organ of collective speech and self-knowledge. The internet is, in this way, inherently recasting our wider notions of what to say, who to be, what to count as authoritative, and how to govern and be governed. What follows are some lines of thought sketching each of these transformations in turn.
Robots that are self-aware have been science fiction fodder for decades, and now we may finally be getting closer. Humans are unique in being able to imagine themselves—to picture themselves in future scenarios, such as walking along the beach on a warm sunny day. Humans can also learn by revisiting past experiences and reflecting on what went right or wrong. While humans and animals acquire and adapt their self-image over their lifetime, most robots still learn using human-provided simulators and models, or by laborious, time-consuming trial and error. Robots have not learned simulate themselves the way humans do.
Richard Feloni: What does Davos stand for in your view? Do you have any particular thoughts on this year’s, specifically?
The winner of Australia’s richest literary prize did not attend the ceremony.
In the digital age, reputations made over decades can be lost in minutes. Richard Dawkins first achieved renown as a pioneering evolutionary biologist (through his 1976 bestseller, The Selfish Gene) and, later, as a polemical foe of religion (through 2006’s The God Delusion). Yet he is now increasingly defined by his incendiary tweets, which have been plausibly denounced as Islamophobic.
Michael Jordan,