No. 113 — Berthe Weill ⫶ Continent of Play ⫶ Benchmarks for AI
Team Room
My name is Linda. I write a bi-weekly newsletter about computer science, childhood, and culture.
Hi, hi. These days I’m most grateful for the very smart raincoat I got last year, one of the wettest springs in Paris since 1886. We’re slipping into moody, cinematic city season. A month until Christmas!
Bisou,
Linda
1.
Last weekend I saw my favorite exhibition of the year: Berthe Weill at the Musée de l’Orangerie.
Weill, a French Jewish gallerist who championed emerging artists in early 20th-century Paris, helped launch names like Picasso, Matisse, and Modigliani. The show mixes luminous favorites by Dufy, Valadon and others with archival material from her gallery.
It also fits a thread I love at the Orangerie: exhibitions that read modern art through its dealers. Modigliani & Paul Guillaume, Heinz Berggruen, now Berthe Weill. A decade in the making, the project traveled via the Grey Art Museum and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and is on until January 26.
This interview by Lindsey Tramuta traces the intense choreography of loans between museums and private collections, and what changes when a show is staged in three different contexts. This kind of persistent work makes me so happy (and I love all the humanity and patience it requires). Here’s a discussion I’m sad I missed at the American Library in Paris,“Berthe Weill and the Parisian Avant-Garde,” with Rachel Donadio, Lynn Gumpert and Sophie Eloy.
2.
As readers of this letter know, I’m hopelessly devoted to Reggio Emilia. The other night, I bought tickets to The Language of Computation: Constructing Modern Knowledge in Reggio Emilia. It’s June 15 - 19, 2026 and I haven’t been in Reggio in forever. Join me?
3.
The Kids Should See This has the best holiday gift lists for kids.
For grown-ups, my perennials: La Cavalerie olive oil; La Tour d’Argent apricot jam;a book and a hat (any kind!); and the vase Acorn.
4.
Big picture, there are two visions for the future of computing: cyborgs and rooms.
- Matt Webb, Spinning up a new thing: Inanimate
Team room! Team room! Also check out Matt Webb’s new studio Inanimate.
5.
Last week Spotify rolled out audiobooks in Finland. It’s a weird social experiment we’ve been living through in the Nordics for the past few years, with subscription listening.
As someone without easy access to Finnish books or libraries, I’ve personally benefited from the model: I can keep reading. On the other hand, it is strange and sad to watch books get folded into the undifferentiated stream of content.
Frank Chimero wrote beautifully this fall about systems that “eat everything,” invoking No Face from Spirited Away, the masked spirit who mimics and consumes whatever’s around him, growing as he eats.
Anyways, here are my.. books? Audio editions? …content?
Finnish authors have a clear wish list for platforms, publishers, and subscription services: a first-year fixed-price window; a streaming levy on audiobook/ebook platforms earmarked for national literature; appropriate, proportionate remuneration in contracts (not per-minute dilution); transparent, platform-level royalty reporting with timely payouts; no forced exclusivity, plus clear opt-out and windowing rights by service and territory. Countries without these guardrails would be wise to set them early.
Books and technology could be so much more. It’s the path not taken that saddens me. Books could be campfires, venues, classrooms. They could schedule events, keep version histories, host marginalia.
I’ve had some horrible experiences with traditional publishing contracts and brittle terms. Technology licensing could also widen the circle: first readers share upside, neighborhoods with local licenses.. Books could even ship with small language models tuned to the text.
I keep thinking about an author’s life’s work. If I’m lucky, I get to make many books over time, some self-funded, others with partners. Books, and especially an author’s body of work, are cultural assets. We should protect them, and the people who make them.
6.
Is anyone in Europe building social platforms for kids that are privacy-first, ad-light, and community-owned? A few friends are assembling a program. In the same key, Continent of Play is a blueprint that treats play as civic infrastructure and is exactly the energy I think we need.
7.
After all, most of the interesting personal use cases for an LLM are very different from answering questions on the International Math Olympiad. (…) We might be using these things to format spreadsheets or spam sales emails. But they are also ghost-like, faux consciousnesses built on a vast archive of human history, flitting between timelines, languages, and personae without ever inhabiting any of them, and doing so in a way that even their creators don’t quite understand.
- Benjamin Breen, How well can Gemini 3 make a Henry James simulator?
I like this idea making your own benchmarks for language models.
Simon Willison asks every model to draw a pelican riding a bicycle in pure SVG. Ethan Mollick checks otter images, tiny games, and T. S. Eliot pastiche. Benjamin Breen builds Henry James RPG. Mine could be building activities with Papert’s Principle (can the model do administrative re-wiring rather than content dump)? Or some kind of Reggio Emilia activity (famously vibe-y, material, very little online documentation and no worksheets)?
A++ for kinda making a gift guide in the intro without making a gift guide.