AROUND THE WORLD

Taylor Swift is TIME Magazine's PERSON OF THE YEAR 2023

...The way she said, “Are you not entertained?”—surely we both knew it was a quote from Gladiator, a movie in which a hero falls from grace, is forced to perform blood sport for the pleasure of spectators, and emerges victorious, having survived humiliation and debasement to soar higher than ever. And the way before I left, she showed me the note from Paul McCartney hanging in her bathroom, which has a Beatles lyric written on it—and not just any Beatles lyric, but this one: “Take these broken wings and learn to fly.” READ MORE FROM TIME

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Sam Altman is TIME Magazine's CEO OF THE YEAR 2023

It was a strange Thanksgiving for Sam Altman. Normally, the CEO of OpenAI flies home to St. Louis to visit family. But this time the holiday came after an existential struggle for control of a company that some believe holds the fate of humanity in its hands. Altman was weary. He went to his Napa Valley ranch for a hike, then returned to San Francisco to spend a few hours with one of the board members who had just fired and reinstated him in the span of five frantic days. He put his computer away for a few hours to cook vegetarian pasta, play loud music, and drink wine with his fiancé Oliver Mulherin. “This was a 10-out-of-10 crazy thing to live through,” Altman tells TIME on Nov. 30. “So I’m still just reeling from that.” READ MORE FROM TIME

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Syd Kitson is TIME Magazine's DREAMER OF THE YEAR 2023

...Babcock Ranch is the first solar-powered town in America, spanning over 18,000 acres and taking over eight years to come to fruition. “We bought 91,000 acres. That's 143 square miles, an area five times the size of the island of Manhattan. We sold 73,000 acres to the state of Florida, meaning 90% of the original ranch is in preservation forever” explains Kitson. The development provides a model for sustainable living by integrating green technologies and eco-friendly practices into its design and operation. READ MORE FROM TIME

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Forget Sam Altman. America's greatest AI visionary is... an English professor in Illinois

A single page of fiction can cover 1,000 years of in-story time; 1,000 pages of story can take place in an instant. That's a neat bit of magic, and it profoundly bothers the kind of people who study literature. Experts have spent years — decades, even — trying to gauge how fast most in-story clocks tick. They tediously counted the words in thousands of books; they laboriously hand-coded computer programs to measure the passage of fictional time. Yet for all their brute-force efforts, they couldn't agree on something as simple as how much time the average page of fiction covers. So it was kind of cool when, last year, ChatGPT did it. Given a well-designed prompt and a passage of fiction, ChatGPT could ingest the text and spit back a fast, precise estimate of how much time had elapsed in the passage. A chunk of Jane Eyre? About a week. A passage of the same length from The Big Sleep? Seventy-five minutes. Over the past few hundred years, the bot calculated, literary time has been slowing down. The average page of literature used to cover an entire day of time; now it barely gets through an hour. READ MORE FROM BUSINESS INSIDER

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In her Renaissance tour movie, Beyoncé chooses freedom over perfection

For the majority of Beyoncé's 27-year career, her name has been synonymous with the pursuit of perfection. It’s an association that’s central to the mythology surrounding her, from her tightly controlled public persona to her tireless work ethic, one whose challenges she references on songs like “Pretty Hurts.” This endeavor has led to her becoming the musical artist with the most Grammy wins in a lifetime, a cultural icon who is, in the words of her husband, Jay Z, “the greatest entertainer our generation has seen.” Perfection has long been Beyoncé’s calling card, but with her new concert film, Renaissance: A Film By Beyoncé, the superstar makes it clear that she’s less concerned now with being perfect than she is with being free. “This tour…I feel liberated,” she says. “I have transitioned into a new animal.” READ MORE FROM TIME

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AI and trust

I trusted a lot today. I trusted my phone to wake me on time. I trusted Uber to arrange a taxi for me, and the driver to get me to the airport safely. I trusted thousands of other drivers on the road not to ram my car on the way. At the airport, I trusted ticket agents and maintenance engineers and everyone else who keeps airlines operating. And the pilot of the plane I flew in. And thousands of other people at the airport and on the plane, any of which could have attacked me. And all the people that prepared and served my breakfast, and the entire food supply chain—any of them could have poisoned me. When I landed here, I trusted thousands more people: at the airport, on the road, in this building, in this room. And that was all before 10:30 this morning. Trust is essential to society. Humans as a species are trusting. We are all sitting here, mostly strangers, confident that nobody will attack us. If we were a roomful of chimpanzees, this would be impossible. We trust many thousands of times a day. Society can’t function without it. And that we don’t even think about it is a measure of how well it all works. READ MORE FROM SCHNEIER ON SECURITY

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In the Dark: A lyrical illustrated invitation to find the light behind the fear

The mind is a camera obscura constantly trying to render an image of reality on the back wall of consciousness through the pinhole of awareness, its aperture narrowed by our selective attention, honed on our hopes and fears. In consequence, the projection we see inside the dark chamber is not raw reality but our hopes and fears magnified — a rendering not of the world as it is but as we are: frightened, confused, hopeful creatures trying to make sense of the mystery that enfolds us, the mystery that we are. This reality-warping begins as the frights and fantasies of childhood, and evolves into the necessary illusions without which our lives would be unlivable. It permeates everything from our mythologies to our mathematics. In the Dark by poet Kate Hoefler and artist Corinna Luyken brings that touching fundament of human nature to life with great levity and sweetness, radiating a reminder that if we are willing to walk through the darkness not with fear but with curiosity, we are saved by wonder. READ MORE FROM THE MARGINALIAN