Artificial General Intelligence: A Discussion with Julian Togelius

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Join host Thomas Arnold with your questions, scenarios, hopes, and fears about AI, as we explore with Julian Togelius author of "Artificial General Intelligence", what the horizon of AI looks like today and what his book might help us notice. Amid so much hype about Artificial General Intelligence (whose arrival is now cast in thousands…

What Happened to Great Stories? – What TV and Literature Should Learn from Each Other

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Hollywood screenwriter Michael Sonnenschein, The Common Reader essayist, literary critic, and Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life writer Henry Oliver, and former screenwriter-playwright and now Interintellect founder-CEO Anna Gát lead a discussion on whether humans have lost their storytelling ability thanks to bitesize phone videos and binge-watching streaming services, or instead we're…

Judaism is Psychedelic

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In this introductory salon, we’ll define key terms like “psychedelic” and “set and setting” in order to show how Jewish wisdom, practices, and narrative can serve as both the container to have an altered experience and the framework through which to prepare for, navigate, and integrate it. Through the Jewish calendar, sacred containers of time,…

Provincials: Postcards from the Peripheries – A Conversation with author Sumana Roy

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From the acclaimed author of How I Became a Tree, an enchanting and joyous exploration of life and creativity at the geographical edges of the modern world “A striking mix of memoir and literary analysis. . . . Wise and whimsical.”—Tunku Varadarajan, Wall Street Journal Who is a provincial? In this subversive book, Sumana Roy…

Judaism is Psychedelic: Rebbe Nachman’s Philosophy on Breath, Song, Dance, and Talking to G-d as Tools for Psychedelic Journeying

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A grandson of the Baal Shem Tov (the founder of Hasidic Judaism), Rebbe Nachman (1772-1810) originally from Bratslav, Ukraine, is growing in popularity to this day as thousands of pilgrims travel to his gravesite in Uman, Ukraine, every year, even during the war, to pray and connect spiritually. Rebbe Nachman is known for his mandate…

Finding a Second Chance with Shakespeare and Freud

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In Second Chances Stephen Greenblatt and Adam Philips discuss how the second chance has been an essential feature of the literary imagination and a promise so central to our existence that we try to reproduce it again and again. Both Shakespeare and Freud believed that we can narrate our life stories as tales of transformation.…