Opinion | The Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce story is a fascinating study of media dragon 🐉 consumption
It’s the biggest story of all time! OK, maybe not, but here’s why it’s still a big deal.
Nobel Prize in Literature speculation
It's Nobel Prize week, with the Nobel Prize in Literatureto be announced on Thursday, 5 October, at 13:00 CEST.
The Swedish Academy will have already settled on a winner by now, so we just wait for the announcement -- though disappointingly I'm finding it hard to muster much enthusiasm about it; there've been a couple of solid choices since, but that Dylan selection really was (and continues to be) deflating.
I'm finding fewer betting-sites giving odds -- with Ladbrokes apparently inaccessible in the US (and I'm too lazy to try via VPN), though they seem to be offering odds. NicerOdds usually has the full comparative run-down -- useful for getting the most bang for your betting buck -- but this year so far seem to only list odds from Betsson and Smarkets; I see there are also odds up at BetUS.
Odds-favorites are most of the usual suspects; if placing bets, note, for example, the big spread on Can Xue (i.e. you'll get a lot more, depending where you place your bet).
There is some Nobel-discussion going on in the usual places, too -- though I haven't been following it. The World Literature Forum's Nobel Prize in Literature 2023 Speculationthread is definitely the leader of the pack, with more than 2000 posts. The Mookse and the Gripes discussion on 2023 Nobel Prize, meanwhile, hasn't gotten very far -- 22 posts, last I checked .....
Expect a few more articles -- the usual re-hashing -- in the coming days -- and we can always hope for a leak or scandal erupting before Thursday .....
How the Writers Guild sunk AI’s ship
Cory Doctorow – “No one’s gonna buy enterprise AI licenses if they can’t fire their workers. After a grinding, 148-day strike, the Writers Guild of America ran the table, conceding virtually nothing and winning virtually everything. The most consequential outcome will be data on streaming viewership.
For the studios, these numbers are state secrets, revealed on a need-to-know, burn-before-reading basis, even within the studios themselves. Hiding streaming data has two obvious benefits to the studios. First, it lets the studios keep creative workers in the dark about the success of the shows they work on, so that their agents and unions can’t bargain for higher pay on the basis of having knocked the last one out of the park. Second, it lets execs hide how many dismal failures they greenlit investors and stock analysts, whose rage and incredulity would send the share prices tumbling and lead to calls for the board to replace top management.
So the fact that these numbers will finally be disclosed is a Big Hairy Deal, but that’s not where everyone’s attention went on this strike. For both writers and their supporters, the most visible deal-point wasn’t streaming data, it was AI. For the AI sector, a 148-day news-cycle about how AI threatened writers’ jobs was a gift from the heavens.”