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Boston Globe
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
A strange Poe novel might be just the right book for today's weird times
Advertisement Rezek, who teaches at Boston University, says that when he first encountered 'Pym' while preparing for his doctoral exams he was 'confused and alarmed by the whole thing! I knew Poe, obviously, for his stories and poems, but as a novel, I just thought, 'Why did he write it? What was he thinking?'' The bafflement is part of the project, adds Wolff, an associate professor in the English department at Tufts. 'I think part of the idea of the series is that it's fun for people to encounter a text that causes some disequilibrium, kind of confuses you.' Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Poe was born in Boston and published his first poetry as simply 'a Bostonian,' forgoing even a pen name. But as both Rezek and Wolff point out, he was primarily a Southern writer, steeped in the racism of antebellum Richmond, where he was raised. 'Poe is one of those where you teach him, you have to reckon with that,' says Rezek. 'His politics don't make you feel good as a modern person.' And yet, Wolff adds, Poe's work in Pym is also 'a kind of window into the antebellum mindset and how much the nation was either grappling with or desperately trying to avoid the question of race and racial difference in slavery.' Advertisement Both scholars point to Toni Morrison's ' 19th century literature helps explain both the past and the present, Rezek says. 'And just understanding America more deeply is an urgent project now.' 'You can read it as really richly and interestingly and provocatively illustrative of some key anxieties and concerns of the Antebellum period,' Adds Wolff. 'But also, he's just a really fun writer who was a master of sensation and of horror and of suspense. I mean, it is a terrifying, gross, kind of funny, strange adventure tale.' Nathan Wolff and Joseph Rezek will speak at 7 p.m. Monday, July 28, at . And now for some recommendations ... ' Advertisement Another timely collection is Rax King's ' been human — this book will speak to you. ' them . Kate Tuttle edits the Globe's books section. Kate Tuttle, a freelance writer and critic, can be reached at
Boston Globe
6 days ago
- Business
- Boston Globe
‘We're able to explore more behaviors a lot more quickly': How one local robotics company uses AI
Harvard for investigating its 'continued eligibility' for a program that gives visas to international students and faculty. Columbia to restore its federal funding after the administration accused it of allowing antisemitism. President Trump's name appears in documents related to Jeffrey Epstein that his administration is refusing to release, . Separately, a House committee voted to subpoena and files from the administration, while a judge rejected an administration request to unseal other documents in the case. Two fired Market Basket executives accused the grocery chain's board of dismissing them Write to us at . To subscribe, . TODAY'S STARTING POINT In conversations about artificial intelligence, the future tense tends to get a workout. Will AI lead to mass layoffs? Which AI company will end up on top? Will the US's new AI strategy, which the White House Yet for many Americans, AI is already a daily reality. AI-powered chatbots provide customer service, That's also true for local businesses. Earlier this year, the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce was looking for ways to help firms navigate AI adoption. 'People seem to be hungry for, 'Well, how are other people using it?'' said Jim Rooney, who leads the Boston Chamber. Advertisement Rooney's solution was a survey. The anonymized results, I wanted to better understand what local businesses' use of AI looks like in practice. Today's newsletter is the first in a two-part series about what I found. Advertisement Better, faster, smarter When I visited Piaggio Fast Forward on a recent Friday, the Charlestown-based robotics company's brick-walled offices were largely devoid of people. But they were populated by something else: a fleet of squat, rotund machines. This was the gita (pronounced like a Bostonian saying Derek Jeter's surname), which Piaggio unveiled in 2019. Essentially a backpack on wheels, the gita mini and gita plus — and stores groceries, gear, or other cargo beneath a central hatch. The robot's camera and sensors detect color and depth, which, with the push of a button and a warbly chime, lets it 'pair' with a specific person and automatically trundle along behind them during errands. The experience feels like having R2-D2 at your heels. (The resemblance is no longer implicit; Piaggio recently reached a licensing agreement with Lucasfilm and Disney to sell $2,875 gita mini s that So where does AI come in? When Tyson Phillips first joined Piaggio to lead its research and development team, the technology wasn't on the menu. But about two and a half years ago, he came to see it as a necessity. Phillips's engineers built their own AI models to help train the company's robots to interact with people and the environment. 'It's actually very difficult to program a robot to do something,' Phillips said. 'AI is shortening that process a lot.' To train the machines, Phillips invites paid human guinea pigs into a high-ceilinged space in Piaggio's offices. Its floor features lines of colorful tape, mannequins, and other obstacles that simulate what a robot might encounter in the outside world, like doors, walls, and people. Using motion capture cameras, Phillips records the volunteers navigating those obstacles, then distills the data into algorithms to program the robots. Advertisement A Piaggio Fast Forward employee presses a button to "pair" with one of the robotics company's gitamini robots. David L. Ryan/Globe Staff Part of AI's advantage is that it isn't human. Where a flesh-and-blood observer might write off a volunteer's subtle turn or weight shift while opening a door as intuitive, AI can recognize such moves as potentially valuable datapoints. 'With AI tools, we are hoping to identify those much smaller, more nuanced behaviors,' Phillips said. And for a relatively small company like Piaggio, the added analytical firepower helps. 'We're able to explore more behaviors a lot more quickly.' That has come in handy to train Piaggio's other robot, kilo, which looks a bit like if Apple designed a flatbed cart. Built for warehouses and factory floors, kilo 'I think we'll use it to allow us to explore situations that we would've been previously uncomfortable in,' he said. Evolutionary vs. revolutionary Piaggio isn't alone. 'Every robotics company's using AI in some way,' Phillips told me. Yet some prognosticators worry that widespread adoption will cause layoffs, particularly among coders. So far, Piaggio says, AI hasn't replaced anyone on Phillips's team, which includes people with backgrounds in AI as well as in biomechanics and neuroscience. In the Boston Chamber's survey, just 7 percent of companies reported job reductions because of AI. Advertisement Instead, just as Piaggio's robots are designed to work alongside people, Phillips hopes that AI will supplement rather than supplant. His engineers still develop algorithms by hand, using AI to check their work. 'We have an idea, we test it, we check it with AI, we tweak the original idea, we tweak the AI, and it bounces back and forth,' he said. Still, that collaborative spirit helps explain why Piaggio's use of AI is mostly evolutionary, facilitating its business without radically reshaping it. But there are companies in Greater Boston trying to use the technology in more revolutionary ways. Next week, in part two of this series, I'll explore that. Related: As Massachusetts lawmakers try to lure AI data centers, environmental advocates from elsewhere warn that the centers 🧩 9 Across: 90° POINTS OF INTEREST UNITE HERE Local 26 represents Fenway Park concession workers who are threatening to strike. Cassandra Klos/Bloomberg Receipts: Massachusetts lawmakers say court-appointed lawyers should've asked the Legislature for raises sooner, rather than launching a work stoppage that has paralyzed state courts. Emails show the attorneys have been asking Labor dispute: Fenway Park concession workers Piling up: Boston 'Pawtriots': The Patriots' first day of training camp saw the team practicing without pads — Advertisement Feeling better: Eight members of a Parisian youth choir are OK Dwight Evans: The former Red Sox right fielder has another shot at making the Hall of Fame this year. Grant Watch: How a researcher from Medfield created the go-to database Changing the subject: Trump and Tulsi Gabbard, his national intelligence director, baselessly claim that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and other Democrats plotted a 'coup' against Trump years ago and that they could face criminal charges. ( Wares the beef: Beef prices are climbing across the country as drought Sentenced: A judge gave Bryan Kohberger life in prison without the possibility of parole for killing four University of Idaho students in 2022. The victims' family members excoriated Kohberger. ( BESIDE THE POINT 🌽 Cultivating community: An 18th-century farm is flourishing 🎙️ Big deal: 'The Big Dig,' GBH and PRX's nine-episode series about the infamous Boston megaproject, made Time magazine's list of the 100 best podcasts of all time. ( 🤦🏻♀️ A Miss Conduct classic: Their neighbors' floodlights shine directly into their bedroom. The neighbors 🐻 'Da Pope': A Chicago family on vacation gave Pope Leo XIV a T-shirt inspired by the nickname for the city's NFL team. ( Advertisement 📺 Don't be a Debbie Downer: 'SNL' alumna Rachel Dratch discusses 💃 A step ahead: A Boston soul line dancing group is 🎶 Don't worry: Does live music at Logan baggage claim actually reduce travel stress? Thanks for reading Starting Point. This newsletter was edited by ❓ Have a question for the team? Email us at ✍🏼 If someone sent you this newsletter, you can 📬 Delivered Monday through Friday. Ian Prasad Philbrick can be reached at
Observer
06-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Observer
Donald Trump, our foundering father
I called my brother, Kevin, to ask if he would spend Independence Day with Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and me. Monticello has a new tour focusing on the relationship of Jefferson and Adams, which culminated in an exchange of 158 letters in their last 14 years of life. Historian David McCullough deemed this attempt of the fiery Bostonian and reticent Virginian to overcome their political feuds and understand each other 'one of the most extraordinary correspondences in American history.' My favourite anecdote about Adams and Jefferson, who both loved Shakespeare and used the Bard's psychological insights as inspiration when they conjured the country, concerned their visit to Shakespeare's house in Stratford-upon-Avon, England. Our family trip to Monticello on Wednesday was suggested by Jane Kamensky, a very cool historian of the American Revolution and the president and CEO of Monticello and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. She thought that my Trump-supporting brother and I might appreciate the new tour, 'Founding Friends, Founding Foes,' as inspiration for 'a thoughtful dialogue across the divide.' Kevin laughed when I told him about the invitation. 'I'm amused,' he said, 'that we are the example of modern-day comity and civility.' Americans are at one another's throats, living in a world of insults, coarseness and cruelty — a world where Donald Trump and JD Vance excel. At Monticello, we talked to Ken Burns, who was giving a preview of his upcoming PBS documentary on the American Revolution. He is finishing it in the nick of time, given Trump's attempts to slash PBS' federal funding. 'The Revolution — no pictures, no newsreels, and more violent than we could possibly imagine,' the film-maker told us. 'The Revolution was not just a quarrel between Englishmen over Indian land and taxes and representation, but a struggle that would involve more than two dozen nations, Europeans as well as Native Americans, that also somehow came to be about the noblest aspirations of humankind.' A year from now is the 250th birthday party for the country. In retrospect, the odds seem impossible. When the patriot militias engaged at sunrise at Lexington Green in April 1775, Burns noted, 'the chances of the success of the operation were zero.' Then, somehow, eight years later, 'we created something new in the world. We were the original anticolonial movement. We turned the world upside down.' Adams and Jefferson constantly talked about virtue and what virtues would help mold our anti-monarchical society. Trump, who plays at being a king, is not interested in virtue; only in humiliation, conflict, enrichment and revenge. (The popular president of the University of Virginia, the school here founded by Jefferson, just announced that he would resign because of Trump's anti-diversity, equity and inclusion pressure campaign.) As Trump rammed through his horrible bill, a humongous wealth transfer, he scoffed at those who suggested there was no virtue in hurting the most vulnerable to make the obscenely rich richer. He keeps insisting that no one will lose Medicaid benefits, but Republicans are cutting more than $1 trillion from the programme, so a lot of people are going to suffer. The Declaration of Independence aspired to equality, while Trump's bill deepens our inequality. I asked Burns if it was possible now to persuade anyone across the aisle of anything, or is everyone just howling into the storm? 'The best arguments in the world won't change a single person's point of view,' he said. 'The only thing that can do that is a good story. Good stories are a kind of benevolent Trojan horse. You let them in, and they add complication, allowing you to understand that sometimes a thing and its opposite are true at the same time.' Reading the Adams-Jefferson letters, I felt that these founders were able to resurrect their relationship the same way I'm able to preserve mine with my siblings. We approach politics carefully, without venom or overblown expectations of changing one another's minds. We look for slivers of common ground: None of us thought Joe Biden should cling to office when he was clearly declining. 'Lord! Lord!' Adams exclaimed with exasperation. 'What can I do, with So much Greek?' Burns said that his half-century of making documentaries about America's wars and pastimes has taught him to embrace contradictions. 'The binaries that we set up are the biggest trap, whether they come from the left or the right,' he said. 'When you see somebody making a 'them', you have to be careful. That's antithetical to what the Declaration is saying. I hope that what we do on the Fourth of July is try to put the 'us' into the US.' Maureen Dowd The writer is an American columnist for The New York Times and an author
The Age
06-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
My close encounter with our founding fathers exposed Trump, our foundering father
I called my brother, Kevin, to ask if he would spend Independence Day with Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and me. Jefferson's home (now museum) in Charlottesville, Monticello, has a new tour focusing on his fond and fractious relationship with Adams, which culminated in an exchange of 158 letters in their last 14 years of life. Historian David McCullough deemed this attempt of the fiery Bostonian and reticent Virginian to overcome their political feuds and understand each other 'one of the most extraordinary correspondences in American history.' My favourite anecdote about Adams and Jefferson, who both loved Shakespeare and used the Bard's psychological insights as inspiration when they conjured the country, concerned their visit to Shakespeare's house in Stratford-upon-Avon, England. As Abigail Adams recalled, her husband cut a relic from Shakespeare's chair, while Jefferson 'fell upon the ground and kissed it'. Our family trip to Monticello on Wednesday was suggested by Jane Kamensky, a very cool historian of the American Revolution and the president and CEO of Monticello and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. She thought that my Trump-supporting brother and I might appreciate the new tour, 'Founding Friends, Founding Foes,' as inspiration for 'a thoughtful dialogue across the divide'. Kevin laughed when I told him about the invitation. 'I'm amused,' he said, 'that we are the example of modern-day comity and civility.' Americans are at one another's throats, living in a world of insults, coarseness and cruelty – a world where Donald Trump and JD Vance excel. Loading At Monticello, we talked to Ken Burns, who was giving a preview of his upcoming PBS documentary on the American Revolution. He is finishing it in the nick of time, given Trump's attempts to slash PBS' federal funding. 'The Revolution – no pictures, no newsreels, and more violent than we could possibly imagine,' the filmmaker told us. 'The Revolution was not just a quarrel between Englishmen over Indian land and taxes and representation, but a bloody struggle that would involve more than two dozen nations, Europeans as well as Native Americans, that also somehow came to be about the noblest aspirations of humankind.' A year from now is the 250th birthday party for the country. In retrospect, the odds seem impossible. When the patriot militias engaged at sunrise at Lexington Green in April 1775, Burns noted, 'the chances of the success of the operation were zero'. Then, somehow, eight years later, 'we created something new in the world. We were the original anti-colonial movement. We turned the world upside down.'
Sydney Morning Herald
06-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
My close encounter with our founding fathers exposed Trump, our foundering father
I called my brother, Kevin, to ask if he would spend Independence Day with Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and me. Jefferson's home (now museum) in Charlottesville, Monticello, has a new tour focusing on his fond and fractious relationship with Adams, which culminated in an exchange of 158 letters in their last 14 years of life. Historian David McCullough deemed this attempt of the fiery Bostonian and reticent Virginian to overcome their political feuds and understand each other 'one of the most extraordinary correspondences in American history.' My favourite anecdote about Adams and Jefferson, who both loved Shakespeare and used the Bard's psychological insights as inspiration when they conjured the country, concerned their visit to Shakespeare's house in Stratford-upon-Avon, England. As Abigail Adams recalled, her husband cut a relic from Shakespeare's chair, while Jefferson 'fell upon the ground and kissed it'. Our family trip to Monticello on Wednesday was suggested by Jane Kamensky, a very cool historian of the American Revolution and the president and CEO of Monticello and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. She thought that my Trump-supporting brother and I might appreciate the new tour, 'Founding Friends, Founding Foes,' as inspiration for 'a thoughtful dialogue across the divide'. Kevin laughed when I told him about the invitation. 'I'm amused,' he said, 'that we are the example of modern-day comity and civility.' Americans are at one another's throats, living in a world of insults, coarseness and cruelty – a world where Donald Trump and JD Vance excel. Loading At Monticello, we talked to Ken Burns, who was giving a preview of his upcoming PBS documentary on the American Revolution. He is finishing it in the nick of time, given Trump's attempts to slash PBS' federal funding. 'The Revolution – no pictures, no newsreels, and more violent than we could possibly imagine,' the filmmaker told us. 'The Revolution was not just a quarrel between Englishmen over Indian land and taxes and representation, but a bloody struggle that would involve more than two dozen nations, Europeans as well as Native Americans, that also somehow came to be about the noblest aspirations of humankind.' A year from now is the 250th birthday party for the country. In retrospect, the odds seem impossible. When the patriot militias engaged at sunrise at Lexington Green in April 1775, Burns noted, 'the chances of the success of the operation were zero'. Then, somehow, eight years later, 'we created something new in the world. We were the original anti-colonial movement. We turned the world upside down.'
