tear down this wall

Our faithful chronicler, Doctor Caligari’s Cabinet, that on this day—among many other momentous occasions—the US president Ronald Reagan, speaking at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin in 1987, publicly challenged General Secretary of the Communist Party Mikhail Gorbachev to open up the barrier that had physically divided the city since 1961.
Though not the first time the Wall itself was the subject of an address—having previously made similar overtures to the “evil empire” from 1982 onwards and not accorded with its legacy and influence until the Wall actually came down a year and a half later and was criticized at the time respectively by US and Soviet advisors as extreme and unpresidential and provocative and war-mongering, the speech looms large in the popular imagination, perhaps at the expense of appreciating the complexities of geopolitical undercurrents in East and West Germany and the Soviet Union.

zone out

Having hosted the debut of the first film script written by a neural network, Ars Technica was already versed with the screen-writing talents of an artificial intelligence named Benjamin, who is now re-enlisted the acting talents of the cast of his first short film, Sunspring, for a bolder experiment in which Benjamin was given full creative control and nearly single-handedly responsible for production from start to finish. Sponsored by the recently concluded Sci-Fi London 48 Hour Challenge, Benjamin adhered to a few basic movie prompts and a few other criteria and drawing on footage from public domain cult classics The Brain that Wouldn’t Die and The Last Man on Earth and digitally inserted the performers into his film.

blogosphere

Chillingly, via Slashdot, we learn that Tanzania is besting its neighbours Uganda and Kenya in severely curtailing internet freedoms, requiring all blogs and online forums to be registered or suspend all operations immediately, on pain of high fines or imprisonment. For a website to continue posting, authors or moderators must pay a licensing fee that just tops the average annual salary for a Tanzanian labourer and one would suppose further acquiescing to not being a general nuisance to the government.

4,645

Eight months after Hurricane Maria made landfall on Puerto Rico, devastating the island and many residents in remote areas are still without basic utilities, the official government tally of fatalities has stood at sixty-four.
An impromptu memorial two weeks ago (and we’re all ashamed for having overlooked such a powerful and important gesture, which illustrates how beastly and uncaring and so easily called away we can be) on the marble courtyard of the San Juan capitol grew into thousands of pairs of empty shoes being neatly lined up to represent a truer number of the number lost in the storm.