1 . The scent of hot bread drifting from the shops along the Street of Flour was sweeter than any perfume Arya had ever smelled. She took a deep breath and stepped closer to the pigeon. It was a plump one, speckled brown, busily pecking at a crust that had fallen between two cobblestones, but when Arya’s shadow touched it, it took to the air.

Her stick sword whistled out and caught it two feet off the ground, and it went down in a flurry of brown feathers. She was on it in the blink of an eye, grabbing a wing as the pigeon flapped and fluttered. It pecked at her hand. She grabbed its neck and twisted until she felt the bone snap.

Compared with catching cats, pigeons were easy.

She tied the pigeon to her belt and started down the street. A man was pushing a load of tarts by on a two-wheeled cart; the smells sang of blueberries and lemons and apricots. Her stomach made a hollow rumbly noise. “Could I have one?” she heard herself say. “A lemon, or…or any kind.”

The pushcart man looked her up and down. Plainly he did not like what he saw. “Three coppers.”

Arya tapped her wooden sword against the side of her boot. “I’ll trade you a fat pigeon,” she said.

“The Others take your pigeon,” the pushcart man said.

The tarts were still warm from the oven. The smells were making her mouth water, but she did not have three coppers... or one. She gave the pushcart man a look, remembering what Syrio had told her about seeing. He was short, with a little round belly, and when he moved he seemed favor his left leg a little. She was just thinking that if she snatched a tart and ran he would never be able to catch her when he said, “You be keeping your filthy hands off. The gold cloaks know how to deal with thieving little gutter rats, that they do.”

Arya glanced warily behind her. Two of the City Watch were standing at the mouth of an alley. Their cloaks hung almost to the ground, the heavy wool dyed a rich gold; their mail and boots and gloves were black. One wore a long sword at his hip, the other an iron cudgel. With a last wistful glance at the tarts, Arya edged back from the cart and hurried off. The gold cloaks had not been paying her any special attention, but the sight of them tied her stomach in knots. Arya had been staying as far from the castle as she could get, yet even from a distance she could see the heads rotting atop the high red walls. Flocks of crows squabbled noisily over each head, thick as flies. The talk in Flea Bottom was that the gold cloaks had associated themselves with the Lannisters, their commander raised to a lord, with lands on the Trident and a seat on the king’s council.

6 . In this issue, as part of our ongoing Century of Science project, we dig deep into how the extraordinary advances in computing over the last 100 years have transformed our lives, and we ponder implications for the future. Who gets to decide how much control algorithms (算法) have over our lives? Will artificial intelligence learn how to really think like humans? What would ethical AI look like? And can we keep the robots from killing us?

That last question may sound imagined, but it’s not. As freelance science and technology writer Matthew Hutson reports, lethal autonomous drones (致命自动无人机) able to attack without human intervention already exist. And though killer drones may be the most dystopian (反乌托邦的) vision of a future controlled by AI, software is already making decisions about our lives every day, from the advertisements we see on Facebook to influencing who gets denied parole (假释) from prison.

Even something as basic to human life as our social interactions can be used by AI to identify individuals within supposedly anonymized data, as staff writer Nikk Ogasa reports. Researchers taught an artificial neural network to identify patterns in the date, time, direction and duration of weekly mobile phone calls and texts in a large anonymized dataset. The AI was able to identify individuals by the patterns of their behavior and that of their contacts.

Innovations in computing have come with astonishing speed, and we humans have adapted almost as quickly. I remember being thrilled with my first laptop, my first flip phone, my first BlackBerry. As we’ve welcomed each new wonder into our lives, we’ve bent our behavior. I could download a productivity app that promises to train me to stay focused, but using the phone to avoid the phone seems both too silly and too sad.

Not enough computer scientists and engineers have training in the social implications of their technologies, Hutson writes, including training in ethics. More importantly, they’re not having enough conversations about how the algorithms they write could affect people’s lives in unexpected ways, before the next big innovation gets sent out into the world. As the technology gets ever more powerful, those conversations need to happen long before the circuit is built or the code is written. How else will the robots know when they’ve gone too far?

9 . Of all my girls, I always felt the closest to Yo. My wife says it is because we are much alike, knocking her head with her knuckles as she says so. But that is not why I feel closest to Yo, no.

She looks at me, and I know that she can see all the way back to when I was a boy in half trousers raising my hand in that palm-wood schoolhouse. What color is the hair of God? When you reduce a sum by its shadow and multiply it by its reflection, what will you get? Our teacher, who called himself Professor Cristiano lluminado, spouted his wild questions. Soon after I passed on to the higher school, the professor was taken away to an asylum to contemplate the mathematics of the stars. But, and this is the point of my anecdote, I was the only child in that classroom raising my hand to answer those impossible questions.

And Yo sees that one hand waving when she looks into my eyes. So that I am blessed — and sometimes cursed — with a child who understands my secret heart. I should not say child anymore, for she is a grown woman who is already preparing herself. When she looks at me these days, she can see that fresh-dug hole in the mountain cemetery near the town where I was born, the flash of the river between the trees.

She writes me one, two letters a week. Sometimes she includes an old black-and-white photo with those scalloped edges as if all memories deserve a little lace doily to lay on. A young handsome man sits with a young lady in a crowded booth in a bar sixty years ago. With those pasting papers which were invented for her because she always has to put her two cents (发表意见) on everything, she writes, Where was this taken? Who is the girl beside you? Were you really in love? She strikes right for the secret heart of that young man!

Most of the things she asks I tell her. I run the past through a sieve (筛子) of judgment in my head, and if there is no harm, I give her the full cup of my life to drink from. Some little things catch in that fine net, and I leave them out or I make a broad statement. But then the next letter arrives full of questioning: Papi, you say you had to escape the island because you were in a revolution in 1939 and I can’t find any mention of it in the book. You say that you were in a log-cabin hospital at Lac Abitibi near the Laurentians and look on the map and Lac Abitibi is nowhere near the Laurentians. Are these just lapses of memory or did you make the whole thing up and if so why?

And then I have to explain, sieving everything over again. Until the next letter arrives, and I explain some more, and after a while, I lose that quality control. Before I know it, I’ve told her the whole story I did not want her and the others to know.

Is that really so? I ask myself. Don’t I want to be known before I go? And perhaps Yo sees that secret desire, stronger than all the other secrets in my heart, and that is why she keeps asking.

10 . There has been a recent wave in Hollywood where studios take popular animated (动画的) films and “improve” upon them by changing them into live-action remakes. The thought that live-action movies are better because they follow the laws of the natural world degrades the style of animation.

The beauty of animation is that its use of caricatures (漫画) and exaggerations (夸张) reflects an amazing amount of creative depth in characters stories that reality cannot. Looking at the bigger picture, it becomes clear that the true purpose of Disney’s ever growing list of live-action remakes is not to comment on the value of animation, although it indirectly does, but a quick way to take advantage of nostalgic (怀旧的) fans.

For evidence, look no further than Disney’s 2019 The Lion King live-action remake, a retelling of the 1994 animated classic. It broke several box office records, raking in a whopping $543.6 million globally in box office sales alone. However, in comparison to the original, the audience satisfaction with the remake decreased greatly on Rotten Tomatoes. This is similar to the the remakes of Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, Dumbo, Aladdin, and the countless other live-action remakes Disney has produced within the last 5 years. This means that Disney no longer needs to come up with new and original content because they can make a big profit just by taking beloved stories and remaking them.

In fact, Disney looks at itself as a business, and therefore considers making a profit as one of their main aims.

The problem with this mentality (心态) is that, while Disney makes a huge profit, audiences, artists, and art suffer. They may no longer create new stories or art styles, but rather serve as money-making machines that require directors to produce the same stories with a fresh coat of paint every 10 years or so. If this cycle continues, artists will be held back from creating new lovable characters and stories full of creativity. The feeling of nostalgia when we see old Disney films could possibly never happen-to newer generations if this cycle does not stop.