storytelling
Zoe Kazan, East of Eden, and the Myth of the Clean Exit
In 1999, Elia Kazan received an honorary Oscar for a career in American theater. He had testified before Congress in 1952 and named eight artists as communist affiliates, and those eight were blacklisted for decades. Protesters outside the ceremony held signs calling him a snitch. His 15-year-old granddaughter watched it all on television, and her…
The Output Is Not the Thing
A newsletter this week credited a model with proving a Fermat theorem. The model produced a proof, and the proof checked out. What it did not do was argue the proof; it produced output that satisfied verification, which is not the same thing. A proof is not an answer; it is a human-readable argument, a…