How To Stop Waiting For Life To Start

The most popular link last time was the Amazon van on the Broomway, with this Ask Polly column second.

1. One of the best things I've read about AI in a long while: A.I. Isn't People. Related: a while ago a frustrated friend venting to me about bad AI usage in her workplace said the phrase "it's not even actual AI, it's just Numberwang", and now I think about this all the time.
2. Roxane Gay on the menopause, writer's block, and how to stop waiting for life to start.
3. Fantasy Herd — like fantasy football, but with dairy cows.
4. On Heated Rivalry as anti-dystopia art. I find this a persuasive argument: media that doesn't look like science fiction nonetheless imagines a parallel world in which awful things are not happening all the time. Of course we like it.
5. A literary plagiarism scandal that is big news in China.
6. I watched a lot of Winter Olympics. This is an interesting look at what over-investing in narratives does to performance — c.f. Ilya Malinin and Alyssa Liu. (I have such strong opinions on which sports are good and which aren't. All the ones where people on skis spin about in the air and get marked on a complicated scale can go, in my opinion, in favour of more actual first-across-the-finish-line races of various kinds.)
7. How good are you at remembering colours? I'm struggling to break 75%, myself.
8. I don't currently need to produce an edition of a digitised manuscript, but if you do, this seems to be a great bit of open source software for it.
9. I'm always wanting to read more about Lauren Groff's insane writing process. She does longhand drafts, then locks them away and starts again based only on her memories of what she's written!
10. I Still <3 The Internet, says Delia Cai.
11. How it feels to write online for a big publication in the age of social media.
12. Vivian Gornick talks about memoir.
13. Making sense of Lent, a season about fasting and self-denial, as a fat person.