Happy Monday, dear reader!
Last Monday was Indigenous People’s Day. Here’s an interactive map where you can enter your address, and it’ll tell you which Indigenous land you’re living in, as well as which languages were spoken.
Stephen and Tabitha King plan to host writers’ retreats at their spooky home in Bangor, Maine! Only up to five writers at a time, but hey, it’s the town IT was set in!
The 2019 Booker Prize was split between Margaret Atwood, and Bernadine Evaristo. Former Booker judge Sam Leith weighs in on why it was a terrible idea.
Poet Roger Elkin judged the Sentinel Quarterly poetry contest, and then decided to use excerpts from some of the poems, without the permission of the poets, as examples of ‘strange’ writing [PDF link]. It’s astonishing that a supposedly celebrated poet is unfamiliar with words such as ‘aurochs’, ‘necrotic’, ‘umlauts’, ‘diacritics’, and even ‘ellipses’. Let that be your motivation to not get bogged down by gatekeeping behavior.
Open AI developed a robot hand that solves Rubik’s cubes. The innovation is in the object manipulation, not in the actual solving (which used an old solving algorithm). The cube had a bunch of sensors and other additions to make it easier to manipulate, so this approach doesn’t generalize to other objects as yet. It’s a cool step forward, and I can’t stop watching the videos.
ICYMI: My Saturday morning post talking about how college perpetuates inequality. If you are college-educated, spend some time mentoring first-generation college-goers to reduce some of this inequality.
GIF of the week: I really just wanted to post a gif, but you need to watch this entire video. This silverback gorilla with its pet bushbaby is the most adorable thing on the internet today.