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“A journalist finds himself in the woods.” Marc Da Costa, a digital artist with a Ph.D. in anthropology, spoke from the controls of an AI-driven video installation at the Onassis Foundation's ONX Studio, a high-tech multimedia laboratory in the Olympic Tower in Midtown Manhattan. He was talking to the computer running this installation. About me.“A huge fleet of food delivery bicycles appears,” Da Costa continued, telling a nonsensical story that AI would soon render on screen. “The heavens open and a friendly, galactic being descends with a scepter. Frank and the galactic being meet the delivery men and share a meal under the forest canopy. ..."Moments later, a fleet of food delivery bikes actually appeared on the three enormous screens surrounding us, the entire scene rendered in a charm...

Dozens of Israeli attacks hit the Gaza Strip over the weekend as Israeli and Hamas officials continued indirect ceasefire talks through mediators in Qatar.The Israeli army said on Sunday that it had hit more than 100 targets across the enclave over the weekend, including sites from which militants had fired at least four projectiles into Israeli territory on Friday and Saturday. It said the strikes killed Hamas militants and that the military took measures to mitigate the risk of harming civilians. The claims could not be independently verified.Gaza's Health Ministry said in a statement on Sunday that 88 Palestinians had been killed in Israeli attacks in the past 24 hours. The ministry's data does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. Gaza Civil Defense, an emergency services a...

The day was sultry. The 61-year-old woman pushed her donkey into a trot. He loved riding around the ring on the beautiful white beast: at a walk, then a trot, then a gallop. Suddenly he noticed a tingling in his hands and feet that spread towards his torso. He recognized the feeling but forced himself to ignore it. It didn't work. His strength seemed to fade, and before he could say or do anything, he felt himself slump forward. As the world turned grey, the donkey stopped. His arms, and then his body, slid down the animal's sweaty neck and fell to the ground. Then everything went black.He woke up looking at the snow-white belly of his donkey. He bent down and neighed softly, then brayed at the approaching instructor. Are you OK? The instructor shouted in alarm. Should I call an ambulance?...

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni traveled to Mar-a-Lago to visit President-elect Donald J. Trump for an informal meeting on Saturday, three people familiar with the trip said.The trip comes just days before Meloni welcomes President Biden to Rome for an official visit to Italy and the Vatican from January 9 to 12.Meloni and Trump have expressed mutual appreciation in the past, and her trip is one of the first visits by a foreign leader to the president-elect's Florida estate since his election. The meeting strengthens the hopes of Meloni's supporters that the conservative Italian prime minister will become Trump's go-to ally in Europe.Much of that role would involve mediating tensions between other European leaders and Trump, who has threatened to start a trade war with the continent ...

The two sides involved in a high-profile Supreme Court fight over a measure that could shut down TikTok submitted their closing written arguments Friday, sharply contesting China's influence on the site and the role the First Amendment should play in evaluating the law .Their briefs, filed under an exceptionally shortened schedule set last month by the justices, were part of a high-stakes fight over the government's insistence that ByteDance, TikTok's parent company, sell the app's U.S. operations or the would close. The Supreme Court, seeking to resolve the case before the statutory deadline of January 19, will consider the arguments in a special session next Friday.The court's ruling, which could come this month, will decide the fate of a powerful and pervasive cultural phenomenon that u...

Syria's main international airport in Damascus will reopen next week, the new government said on Saturday, in a bid to restore a sense of normality after the uprising that toppled President Bashar al-Assad.The announcement came amid tensions along the border between Syria and Lebanon, where four Lebanese soldiers were injured in clashes on Friday evening. The Lebanese army said Syrian militants had fired on Lebanese soldiers along the border.Ahmad al-Shara, Syria's new de facto leader, faces the challenge of imposing order in a country that has been ravaged by 14 years of civil war that has divided it into multiple war-torn regions and spurred a proliferation of groups armed.Al-Shara, who leads Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Islamic group that led the surprise attack that toppled al-Assad, has ...

Alcohol is a leading preventable cause of cancer and alcoholic beverages should carry a warning label like cigarette packs do, the U.S. surgeon general said Friday.It's the latest salvo in a heated debate over the risks and benefits of moderate drinking as the influential U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans are about to be updated. For decades it was said that drinking moderately helped prevent heart attacks and strokes. This perception has been incorporated into the dietary advice given to Americans. But growing research has linked alcohol consumption, sometimes even within recommended limits, to various types of cancer. Labels currently on bottles and cans of alcoholic beverages warn of drinking during pregnancy or before driving or operating other machinery, and of "health risks" in g...

In the second book of the trilogy, "Small World" (1984), Morris Zapp, an astute theorist lecturing at a conference, uses the striptease style supposedly popular in the nudist go-go bars of Berkeley, California, as a metaphor of what continental theory has discovered about language:“This is not striptease, it is all strip and no tease, it is the terpsichorean equivalent of the hermeneutic fallacy of recoverable meaning, according to which if we remove the covering of its rhetoric from a literary text we discover the bare facts that it is. trying to communicate."It is the beginning of a long and hilarious comic monologue on poststructuralist theory, all the more effective because, like the previous one, it is actually analysable. It is also obscene, so much so that during its performance “a ...

To members of his synagogue, the voice that blared from the speakers at Congregation Emanu El in Houston sounded just like that of Rabbi Josh Fixler.At the same steady pace his congregation had grown accustomed to, the voice delivered a sermon on what it meant to be a neighbor in the age of artificial intelligence. Then, Rabbi Fixler went to the bimah himself.“The audio you heard a moment ago might sound like my words,” he said. "But they weren't."The recording was created by what Rabbi Fixler called the “Rabbi Bot,” an AI chatbot trained on his old sermons. The chatbot, created with the help of a data scientist, wrote the sermon, also delivering it in an AI version of its voice. During the remainder of the service, Rabbi Fixler intermittently asked Rabbi Bot questions aloud, which he prom...