Yorkshire Word

There is a distinction worth drawing between luxury and beauty, or more precisely between opulence and grace. Marcel is a useful case study. Everything about the place signals a level of unrestricted aesthetic devotion at which money seems almost an abstract annoyance. There’s a Helen Frankenthaler on the wall, and a Robert Indiana tucked coyly under the stairs. And yet money, in its most indiscreet sense, is everywhere: each piece of flatware and plateware is available for purchase, as your server may mention, and bronze-framed vitrines that serve as subtle room dividers display treasures from Sotheby’s—a claw-like Chaumet necklace, a pocket-size John Chamberlain “tidbit” sculpture—with placards noting, pointedly, “price available on request.” In the dining room’s previous lives—say, as Flora Bar, in the Met days—lunch might be followed by a wander upstairs to see a collection of Munch or Celmins paintings, and diners at Marcel can similarly tour certain Sotheby’s floors that are open to the public. Still, there is a fundamental difference between a show and a showroom: one is culture, the other is retail. Restaurants, at their best, are adept at fusing the two, which I suspect is why Marcel feels compelling and coherent even when its corporate landlord fails to muffle the ka-ching of the cash registers.

What about Meta’s A.I.-enabled smart glasses, which have raised questions about privacy and surveillance? In a recent thread on Bluesky, the writer Sarah Rose, who is legally blind, described them as “absolute game changers for the blind community.” It is “incredible,” she wrote, “to talk to your glasses and ask them what they see.”

“I Am Not a Robot” looks, superficially, like an attempt to assess the value of A.I.—a doomed endeavor, since the technology is always improving. (“One of the biggest obstacles I faced was that the tech kept getting better faster than I could test or write,” she notes.) On a deeper level, though, the book is a performance in which Stern models the process of deciding whether different kinds of A.I. are good for her, as an individual. She notes that she wrote all of “I Am Not a Robot” herself (the words “started in my brain and traveled, via my MacBook keyboard, onto the page”), yet she also employed “BookBots”: custom A.I. agents she built using ChatGPT and Claude. These bots, she explains, had access to her outlines and transcripts, and throughout the writing process they “researched, summarized papers, crunched data, copyedited sections, suggested better words, brainstormed, and even mocked-up illustration ideas.” (When the book was finished, they wrote the blurbs: “ ‘I Am Not a Robot’ is unusually self-aware,” ChatGPT observed.) Stern questions whether using the BookBots was a good idea. Did having them “constantly edit and tighten my writing cost me the version of this book that might have resulted from the slower, more reflective process of figuring out what I actually wanted to say?” She doesn’t really arrive at an answer, perhaps because whatever insight she found wouldn’t necessarily apply to anyone else.