Appetizers
| Teal Pumpkin Project “Putting a teal pumpkin on your doorstep means you have non-food treats available, such as glow sticks or small toys. This simple act promotes inclusion for trick-or-treaters with food allergies or other conditions.” | 2m |
| Harold Bloom, A Rare Best-Selling Literary Critic, Dies At 89 “Harold Bloom was a rarity: a best-selling and widely known literary critic. Affectionately dubbed the “King Kong” of criticism, Bloom died Monday at the age of 89…” Check out what the library has by Harold Bloom, here. | 2m37s |
| Why are kids watching other people play video games? A tech expert weighs in “Today, watching others play has become quite a phenomenon. Part of this is because of the “personalties” that are attached to the streaming channels on Twitch or Mixer.” | 5m |
| How to take a literary selfie “…literary selfie – a snapshot that captures a moment, sometimes the moment when a shock occurs, which is a very interesting idea for the writer of the short-story, which nearly always is the description of a moment, and very often, that of a shock.” | 7m |
| The Cultural History of ‘The Addams Family’ “Throughout their various iterations, the family has cemented itself in the mausoleum of pop horror culture history, which to some degree is strange within itself. Unlike Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolfman, or any of the machete-wielding madmen at the multiplex, the Addamses have been both surprisingly difficult to forget but equally challenging to bring back to life…How exactly did they find themselves in this kooky situation?” To find books and movies regarding Charles Addams, click here. | 10m |
Entrées
| In France, Elder Care Comes with the Mail “A month of these weekly visits plus an emergency-call button costs Jeannine €37.90. The fee is collected by La Poste, the French postal service, as part of a program called Veiller Sur Mes Parents (“Watch Over My Parents”). Every day except Sunday, postal workers inform the program’s subscribers, through an app, if their elderly relatives are “well”: if they require assistance with groceries, home repairs, outings, or“other needs.” | 14m |
| Machines Beat Humans on a Reading Test. But Do They Understand? “In the fall of 2017, Sam Bowman, a computational linguist at New York University, figured that computers still weren’t very good at understanding the written word. Sure, they had become decent at simulating that understanding in certain narrow domains, like automatic translation or sentiment analysis (for example, determining if a sentence sounds “mean or nice,” he said). But Bowman wanted measurable evidence of the genuine article: bona fide, human-style reading comprehension in English. So he came up with a test.” | 14m |
| The well-educated person “An education does not put sight, or intelligence, into blind eyes, but turns us around to face the Sun and the good by cutting the bonds of desires that keep us in darkness, focused on mere distorted images of the good, rather than the good itself. “ To take a class at the library, click here. | 20m |
Dessert
