The science of soulmates: Is there someone out there exactly right for you? On Valentine's Day, there's the temptation to believe that somewhere out there is The One: a soulmate, a perfect match, the person you were meant to be with. Across history, humans have always been drawn to the idea that love isn't random. In ancient Greece, Plato imagined that we were once whole beings with four arms, four legs and two faces, so radiant that Zeus split us in two; ever since, each half has roamed the earth searching for its missing other, a myth that gives the modern soulmate its poetic pedigree and the promise that somewhere, someone will finally make us feel complete. In the Middle Ages, troubadours and Arthurian tales recast that longing as courtly love, a fierce, often forbidden devotion like Lancelot's for Guinevere, in which a knight proved his worth through self-sacrifice for a beloved he might never openly declare.

Alien: Earth begins where most Alien stories end: with a crew of blue-collar workers realizing that they are, and have always been, doomed. Deemed expendable by their employers over the monsters in the cargo hold (at least the crew of the USCSS Maginot, unlike the Nostromo, knew the monsters were the mission), they are made mortally aware of their place at the bottom of several food chains at once. With the FX show's fifth episode, cheekily titled "In Space, No One …," creator Noah Hawley takes us back to the Maginot's corridors to give viewers a rendition of Alien in miniature, retrofitting the sturdy bones of Ridley Scott's seminal film to his own ends. This may sound like a cynical enterprise, but it's par for the course for Alien. As Slate's own Sam Adams has noted, the series is Hollywood's greatest non-franchise, a collection of films (and comic books and video games) constantly remixing a few primary colors into compelling new shades.

Looking at how social values are represented in fairy tales can give insights about the variations in communication of values across cultures. We study how values are communicated in fairy tales from Portugal, Italy and Germany using a technique called word embedding with a compass to quantify vocabulary differences and commonalities. We study how these three national traditions differ in their explicit references to values. To do this, we specify a list of value-charged tokens, consider their word stems and analyse the distance between these in a bespoke pre-trained Word2Vec model. We triangulate and critically discuss the validity of the resulting hypotheses emerging from this quantitative model. Our claim is that this is a reusable and reproducible method for the study of the values explicitly referenced in historical corpora. Finally, our preliminary findings hint at a shared cultural understanding and the expression of values such as Benevolence, Conformity, and Universalism across the studied cultures, suggesting the potential existence of a pan-European cultural memory.

When Spike Jonze's Her came out in 2013, the film about a lonely man falling for an artificially intelligent operating system won widespread praise. Watching today, the qualities critics celebrated at the time are still there--it's a gentle, enjoyably melancholy story, twee but not damnably so--but something else stands out. Though set in the near-future, Her captures Obama-era techno-optimism better than any other movie. It's a time capsule, preserving dreams about the future that appear more naive the further we get from the 2010s. Her takes place in a highly-stylized version of Los Angeles from a future near enough that its protagonist is a former LA Weekly journalist but distant enough that the skyline rivals Shanghai.

Social biases and stereotypes are embedded in our culture in part through their presence in our stories, as evidenced by the rich history of humanities and social science literature analyzing such biases in children stories. Because these analyses are often conducted manually and at a small scale, such investigations can benefit from the use of more recent natural language processing methods that examine social bias in models and data corpora. Our work joins this interdisciplinary effort and makes a unique contribution by taking into account the event narrative structures when analyzing the social bias of stories. We propose a computational pipeline that automatically extracts a story's temporal narrative verb-based event chain for each of its characters as well as character attributes such as gender. We also present a verb-based event annotation scheme that can facilitate bias analysis by including categories such as those that align with traditional stereotypes. Through a case study analyzing gender bias in fairy tales, we demonstrate that our framework can reveal bias in not only the unigram verb-based events in which female and male characters participate but also in the temporal narrative order of such event participation.

In the 22 years since the publication of her first story collection, Stranger Things Happen, Kelly Link's fiction has crept from the status of cult favorite to something approaching the mainstream--or, rather, the mainstream has crept toward her. Link has never written a novel, only short stories (although a novel has been promised for next year), and her first two books were published by the small press she operates with her husband, Gavin Grant. Furthermore, she writes in genres once regarded as peripheral: fantasy and (occasionally) science fiction. None of this has been considered conducive to literary fame, but times have changed. Novelists ranging from Michael Chabon (a big Link fan) to Kate Atkinson have dissolved many of the boundaries between genre fiction and the mainstream.

I first spoke with Cory Doctorow two years ago. I was trying to get a handle on the sci-fi genre known as cyberpunk, most famously associated with the work of William Gibson. Doctorow, who is often described as a post-cyberpunk writer, is both a theorist-practitioner of science fiction and a vigorous commentator on technology and policymaking; his answers to my questions were long, thoughtful, and full of examples. And so, after that first talk, I made plans to speak with him again, not for research purposes but as the basis for the interview below. Doctorow, who is fifty-one, grew up in Toronto, the descendant of Jewish immigrants from what are now Poland, Russia, and Ukraine.

Fairy tales are a common resource for young children to learn a language or understand how a society works. However, gender bias, e.g., stereotypical gender roles, in this literature may cause harm and skew children's world view. Instead of decades of qualitative and manual analysis of gender bias in fairy tales, we computationally analyze gender bias in a fairy tale dataset containing 624 fairy tales from 7 different cultures. We specifically examine gender difference in terms of moral foundations, which are measures of human morality, and events, which reveal human activities associated with each character. We find that the number of male characters is two times that of female characters, showing a disproportionate gender representation. Our analysis further reveal stereotypical portrayals of both male and female characters in terms of moral foundations and events. Female characters turn out more associated with care-, loyalty- and sanctity- related moral words, while male characters are more associated with fairness- and authority- related moral words. Female characters' events are often about emotion (e.g., weep), appearance (e.g., comb), household (e.g., bake), etc.; while male characters' events are more about profession (e.g., hunt), violence (e.g., destroy), justice (e.g., judge), etc. Gender bias in terms of moral foundations shows an obvious difference across cultures. For example, female characters are more associated with care and sanctity in high uncertainty-avoidance cultures which are less open to changes and unpredictability. Based on the results, we propose implications for children's literature and early literacy research.

Storytelling is an open-ended task that entails creative thinking and requires a constant flow of ideas. Natural language generation (NLG) for storytelling is especially challenging because it requires the generated text to follow an overall theme while remaining creative and diverse to engage the reader. In this work, we introduce a system and a web-based demo, FairyTailor, for human-in-the-loop visual story co-creation. Users can create a cohesive children's fairytale by weaving generated texts and retrieved images with their input. FairyTailor adds another modality and modifies the text generation process to produce a coherent and creative sequence of text and images. To our knowledge, this is the first dynamic tool for multimodal story generation that allows interactive co-formation of both texts and images. It allows users to give feedback on co-created stories and share their results.

Even with technology, sometimes we believe in fairy tales. A fairy tale is a story with a "fantastic and magical setting or magical influences within a story." I hadn't thought much about fairy tales recently, until I began reviewing the number of online case studies about artificial intelligence (AI) in companies. In most of these case studies, the bottom line was that an AI solution had been successfully implemented. However, when I reviewed the stories for business outcomes or results, the results weren't there.