We met Lyonne in a corner of the studio where uncanny clips generated by Asteria’s AI model were playing on a dozen old-school televisions. The footage was unnerving. Robots with smooth, blank faces typed blindly in an old-fashioned office. Disembodied mannequin heads drifted in space. Lyonne was drinking a sugar-free Red Bull and wearing a structured black velvet jacket with a plunging neckline. She was fresh off a plane from Seattle, where she had done a talk with the science-fiction author Ted Chiang, who has written at length about why AI will never create great art. Over the past few years in Hollywood, it had become clear to Lyonne that many people were not being forthright with how often they were using the technology. “If I’m directing an episode, I like to get really into line items and specifics,” she said. “And you find out that there’s a lot of situations where they’re calling it machine learning or something but, really, it’s AI.” She had begun to do her own research. She read the Oxford scholar Brian Christian and the philosopher Nick Bostrom, who argues that AI presents a significant threat to humanity’s long-term existence. Still, she had come to feel it was too late to “put the genie back in that bottle.” “It’s better to get your hands dirty than pretend it’s not happening, she said.
Less than a millimetre in length, the squishy, transparent animal was completely unaware of my presence, my entire existence, while I watched it in awe. On my computer screen, where I gazed at the image generated by a cheap USB microscope, the water bear stumbled over grains of eroded rock and plant matter, an assemblage of soil, and I felt amused by its bumbling nature. Like someone trying to move through a field of beach balls, I thought.
At least half the products are still in boxes, and there are signs on the walls warning customers to NOT OPEN THE BOXES, so you have to scan the barcode with your phone or decipher clipped product descriptions: “module stool,” “gratitude journal,” “Xmas tea light green.” But the great innovation of Amazing Binz is its pricing structure, which is splashed across the facade in Spanish and English and makes good on the promise of CRAZY DEALS. On Fridays, when the bins are freshly stocked, everything costs $10. On Saturdays, $8. Sundays: $6. Mondays: $4. Tuesdays: $2. Wednesdays: $1. Thursday is bin store Sabbath, when the shop is closed and restocked.
The store is like nothing else on the block, which boasts, among other things, a yoga studio, two vape shops, a volunteer-run book store and a Marxist reading room, and no fewer than four Ethiopian joints.
Where did all this stuff come from? Who opened this store, and why? Is it profitable? What does it mean for the uneven gentrification of Baltimore Avenue and West Philadelphia? I decided to spend a week visiting Amazing Binz every day. Here is what I found.
With their lighting, restaurants aim to strike a balance between functionality and the immersive theater they’re inviting diners into for a few hours. Unfortunately, diners and restaurant owners don’t always agree on what constitutes bright enough.
In a place where the ocean long served as the main highway, roads came late. When Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949, there were just 195km of pavement for a province with more than 29,000km of coastline. The obvious solution was to build roads, with the goal of improving access to jobs, schools and healthcare. But this came at a cost. Building takes time and the initial roadways bypassed many small coastal settlements, leading to the abandonment of more than 300 outport communities.
"But a new road can change everything," Keith Pike, the city manager in Red Bay, an outport on Labrador's southern coast told me, after I'd continued my trip west. Just 80km north of the Quebec border and the Newfoundland-Labrador ferry terminal in Blanc-Sablon, Red Bay hugs the edge of the Strait of Belle Isle. Not long ago it also marked the end of the old gravel road; isolation that forced Pike to leave the place his family had called home for generations. But with the recent completion of the Trans-Labrador Highway – known as Expedition 51 for the latitude it follows – he has returned, and is hopeful others might do the same.
You never know when it’s the last time. There was a last time that I crawled, a last time I used training wheels on my bike, a last night that my immediate family lived under one roof. There were last kisses in fading relationships, last shows with bands that broke up, last laughs with friends who have died. One day, I’ll climb a mountain for the last time, talk to my parents for the last time, see a sunset for the last time.
My singing voice was as constant as my heartbeat, as unique as my fingerprints, as necessary to my self-recognition as seeing my face in the mirror. Despite this awareness of life’s endings, I somehow never expected that there would be a last time that I would sing with my steady, reliable voice.
While our ancestors were evolving in the intervening aeons – learning how to use fire, circling the globe, discovering petroleum and then polluting the atmosphere with greenhouse gases – “the animals in Movile cave slurped up their microbial crop” oblivious to the world outside.
They represent just a few of the exotic species that populate Riley’s fascinating portrait of how life survives despite radiation, desiccation, the heat of the Sahara, freezing polar temperatures, total darkness, extended famine, lack of oxygen and the oceans’ abyssal depths.
London Feeds Itself functions both as an alternative guidebook to London, and as a utopic vision of a city now plagued by traffic wars and landlordism. In doubling up as an urban planning document, and in doing so, the volume introduces a new materialist form of food writing: one that works from the plate up toward the hand that plates it, and eats from it.