Pepper

Lots of good stuff in this week's New Yorker:

• James Surowiecki gives an overview of prediction markets which he is qualified to do since he wrote The Wisdom of Crowds


• Alex Ross on Sibelius


• A short piece by David Sedaris


• A short story by Stuart Dybek


• Louis Menand reviews Bryan Caplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies


• Anthony Lane reviews The Transformers and Rescue Dawn

MacArthur Grant winner Luis von Ahn is using online games to allow humans to help solve computing problems. For example, he's using human evaluations of photos to give computers an aesthetic judgment sensibility. The games, when they're show ready, will be online here.

Taiwanese director Edward Yang died yesterday of complications from colon cancer. He was 59. His film Yi Yi is humane and moving, not to mention a fascinating specimen of Asian long-shot cinema.



AllofMP3 now officially dead, shut down by the Russian government. It seems, however, to have arisen from the dead under a new URL.

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