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Beeple (Mike Winkelmann) is a graphic designer and an artist. He is best known for his series “Everydays,” a long-running project in which he creates and shares online a new piece of digital art each day. In March, the auction house Christie’s sold a collection of them titled “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” as an N.F.T. (non-fungible token), for sixty-nine million dollars. Kyle Chayka recently wrote for
Anil Dash is a blogger, artist, ethical technologist, and the C.E.O. of Glitch, a site that helps its users create Web applications. He frequently writes about society, media, and art, with a particular focus on how to leverage technology to support a more humane world. He has written about the pitfalls of N.F.T.s and serves on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Stack Overflow, and the nonprofit research organization Data & Society, among others. He was previously a contributor to
WE ARE XPRIZE
In 2015, Carbon XPRIZE sponsors NRG and COSIA put up 20 rocks to jumpstart the carbontech economy and tackle global warming. The results are in, and they are thrilling.
In 1919, a hotelier announced a challenge that captured the worldâs imagination: He offered $25,000 to the first person who could fly non-stop from New York City to Paris. Over the next 8 years, nine entrepreneurial teams would spend $400,000 to make the impossible real, igniting public interest in flight and accelerating aviation technology in the process. Your fifth grade social studies teacher taught you the rest; a U.S. Air Mail pilot won the prize, and a lauded place in history.
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If you want to see âBlindness,â a new show created by Donmar Warehouse and up at the Daryl Roth Theatreâ
up not on some Web site but in the antediluvian sense: at a place other than your home, scheduled for a non-negotiable timeâyouâll have to submit to the weird rigors of
COVID screening. If youâve eaten at a restaurant or gone to the dentist lately, you can probably rattle off the questionnaire by heart: Have you coughed? Are you hot? Have you, to your knowledge, recently consorted with the possibly ill? That test successfully passed, youâll have your temperature taken by what looks like a futuristic grocery scannerâthen, with no detour to the bathroom, which is closed, youâll be ushered to your socially distanced seat.
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On the stage of an empty concert hall, the Austrian-born composer Peter Ablinger sits in a chair and begins to tell the time. “At the third stroke, it will be twenty o’clock precisely,” he says, adhering to the hallowed formula of the BBC’s Speaking Clock. He accompanies himself with a simple C-minor sequence on a keyboard. After continuing in this vein for twenty minutes, Ablinger cedes the floor to the young German actress Salome Manyak, who speaks over an atmospherically bleeping soundtrack by the Finnish experimental musician Olli Aarni. The ritual goes on for nearly twenty-seven hours, with an ever-changing team of artists, curators, composers, singers, and d.j.s announcing the time in German, English, Italian, French, Spanish, Turkish, Arabic, Farsi, Oromo, Mandarin, and twelve other languages. A rotating assortment of prerecorded tracks, usually electronic, provide accompaniment. Most of the reciters maintain a crisp, cool demeanor, even whe
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âWho do you go to if you canât go to the cops?â Jewel Machado, a high-achieving Latinx teen-ager, wonders, unbelievably, in the pilot of the CBS action procedural âThe Equalizer.â Even considering the relative conservatism of prime-time drama, the line struck me as glaringly unhip. Wouldnât this character, coded as she is,
get it? And yet the series is full of Jewel Machados: people who are marginalized but still stunningly naïve about the forces of marginalization. Their cluelessness allows âThe Equalizerâ to showcase the bad-bitch proficiency of its hero, Robyn McCall, played by the congenitally warm Queen Latifah. In each episode, an unequal system plunges a character, who is poor or Black or both, to the darkest of depths, and McCall, a former C.I.A. agent, is invariably there to rescue them. Though she is styled a lot like Olivia Benson of âLaw and Order: S.V.U.,â in domme leather outfits, ofte