Fast Food & Grocery: An AI And Automation Takeover

CNBC (July 15, 2024): Fully autonomous fast-food chains to smart carts lining grocery store parking lots, the way the food industry looks is changing due to massive investment in AI technology.

Chapters: 0:00 Introduction 2:34 CH 1. Digitizing food retail 5:35 CH 2. The risk and reward from robots 8:30 CH 3. What’s next?

The American consumer is starting to pull back on spending and rising food and labor costs are causing the food industry to invest more into automation to lower labor costs and improve sales, in order to stay competitive and take advantage of shifting consumer taste.

Culture/Politics: Harper’s Magazine – August 2024

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HARPER’S MAGAZINE – July 15, 2024: The latest issue features ‘The New Satanic Panic’ – Exorcism in the Age of TikTok; Has Psychology ruined Poetry; America’s Last Granite Carvers; William T. Vollmann reports from Korea’s DMZ, Matthew Karp on the decline of the American left, Jonathan Lethem on museums, Hisham Matar on the dangers of not knowing, Christian Wiman on Seamus Heaney, and more.

The Demon Slayers

The new age of American exorcisms by Sam Kestenbaum

The pastor is pacing back and forth, a cordless microphone in one hand, the other extended before him. He says, “This is the awakening the American church has been waiting on,” and keeps pacing. He has readied himself before taking the elevated stage, donning a paisley shirt, top button undone, and speaks now from the wood pulpit of his revival tent. 

Music and Mystery  

Seamus Heaney and the end of the poetic career

The Letters of Seamus Heaney, edited by Christopher Reid. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 848 pages. $45.

This buoyant anvil of a book has brought me to the edge of a nervous breakdown. Night after night I’m waking with Seamus Heaney sizzling through—not me, exactly, but the me I was thirty-four years ago when I first read him, in a one-windowed, mold-walled studio in Seattle, when night after night I woke with another current (is it another current?) sizzling through my circuits: ambition. Not ambition to succeed on the world’s terms (though that asserted its own maddening static) but ambition to find forms for the seethe of rage, remembrance, and wild vitality that seemed, unaccountably, like sound inside me, demanding language but prelinguistic, somehow. I felt imprisoned by these vague but stabbing haunt-songs that were, I sensed, my only means of freedom.

Preview: The New Yorker Magazine – July 22, 2024

In a Supreme Court portrait Trumps head replaces the heads of the Conservative Justices.

The New Yorker (July 15, 2024): The latest issue features Anita Kunz’s “The Face of Justice” – The remaking of the Supreme Court in Donald Trump’s image.

F.D.R.’s Election Lessons for Joe Biden and the Democrats

Less than six weeks before Democrats formally choose their nominee, the President is marching down a path of constant peril.

Inside the Trump Plan for 2025

A network of well-funded far-right activists is preparing for the former President’s return to the White House. By Jonathan Blitzer

Paradise Bronx

Paradise Bronx

From the time of the Revolutionary War to the fires of the nineteen-seventies, the history of the borough has always been shaped by its in-between-ness.

By Ian Frazier

News: Political Impact Of The Trump Assassination Attempt, Israel-Gaza Talks

The Globalist Podcast (July 15, 2024): The former president was speaking at a rally in Pennsylvania when he was shot at, with a bullet reportedly grazing his ear. How will the assassination attempt reshape the presidential race?

Then we get the latest from Israel as it intensifies its assault on Gaza, head to Rwanda where incumbent Paul Kagame is poised to win a fourth term in office and discuss Japan’s defence shake-up. Plus, we report from Italy’s Globo d’Oro Awards.

The New York Times — Monday, July 15, 2024

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Biden Asks America to ‘Lower the Temperature’ After Trump Shooting

The president spoke from the Oval Office in a prime-time address, saying, “We can’t allow this violence to be normalized.”

Secret Service Under Scrutiny After Assassination Attempt on Trump

President Biden calls for a review of the protective agency’s actions after the attack, which left an audience member dead and two critically wounded.

A Father’s Last Act: Shielding His Family From Gunshots

Relatives and friends described Corey Comperatore, who was fatally shot at a Trump rally, as a devoted father who served as a volunteer firefighter and loved to fish.

An Assassination Attempt That Seems Likely to Tear America Further Apart

The attack on former President Donald J. Trump comes at a time when the United States is already polarized along ideological and cultural lines and is split, it often seems, into two realities.