Advertisement
The Post's premier daily podcast, featuring unparalleled reporting, expert insight and clear analysis, every weekday afternoon.
What’s stalling the self-driving car revolution
Faiz Siddiqui explains the engineering challenge behind training self-driving cars. Madhulika Sikka shares the story of an author and filmmaker excavating the experiences of black Americans. Plus, Matt Viser unpacks a Dukakis family tradition.
Wednesday, November 27, 2019
What self-driving cars are still struggling to recognize
For years, engineers have raced to program artificial intelligence to recognize the scenarios that human drivers understand implicitly — like the difference between a shadow, a puddle and a pothole.
But their efforts to propel self-driving cars into the mainstream have sometimes had disastrous results, such as the death of a jaywalker last year.
“It was the first known fatality from self-driving vehicles,” tech reporter Faiz Siddiqui says. “And there was a lot of interest in the subject, because the tech industry has staked the future on this idea of self-driving.”
More on this topic:
- What self-driving cars can’t recognize may be a matter of life and death
- How does an autonomous car work? Not so great.
- Hottest job in China’s hinterlands: Teaching AI to tell a truck from a turtle
- Silicon Valley pioneered self-driving cars. But some of its tech-savvy residents don’t want them tested in their neighborhoods.
Attica Locke left Hollywood screenwriting to write novels. Now she’s doing both.
Attica Locke went to Hollywood with big ambitions: “She wanted to be a director and writer in Hollywood,” says Post Reports executive producer Madhulika Sikka.
But when Locke got there, it didn’t work out as she had hoped. There was no appetite for her voice, she says, and nobody wanted to produce the movies she was hired to write — black stories helmed by black characters. She toiled away in L.A. as a writer for hire before quitting, mortgaging her home and writing a successful novel.
Then, something changed in Hollywood, and she was back as a writer/producer for the hit Fox show “Empire.” Since then, she has released her fifth crime novel, “Heaven, My Home,” and is writing screenplays for Netflix and Hulu shows, proving that there is a demand for stories about black characters — on the page and on the screen.
More on this topic:
- Attica Locke left Hollywood to write novels. Now she’s found success in both worlds.
- ‘Bluebird, Bluebird’: No black-and-white answers in this tale of race and murder
A former presidential nominee's plan for Thanksgiving leftovers
In 2015, writer Matt Viser reported on Michael Dukakis's passion for preserving turkey carcasses. “It was one of my favorite stories, I think, over my entire career in journalism,” Viser said.
The former Massachusetts governor and one-time Democratic presidential nominee was said, each year, to collect Thanksgiving turkey carcasses to make soup for his extended family for the year to come.
“Throwing out a turkey carcass is sinful,” Dukakis said at the time. “It’s a terrible thing to do. There’s so much richness and goodness in a turkey carcass.”
More on this topic:
Add to a podcast app
Listen to new episodes on your smartphone or other device.
Play on a smart speaker
Amazon Echo
Enable the Flash Briefing in the Amazon Skill store or search for "The Washington Post" in the Skill section of your Alexa app. Then ask, "Alexa, what's my Flash Briefing?" or "Alexa, what's the news?"
Google Home
Send Post Reports to your Google Assistant device or say, "Okay Google, play the news from Post Reports."
What’s stalling the self-driving car revolution
Faiz Siddiqui explains the engineering challenge behind training self-driving cars. Madhulika Sikka shares the story of an author and filmmaker excavating the experiences of black Americans. Plus, Matt Viser unpacks a Dukakis family tradition.
Wednesday, November 27, 2019
What self-driving cars are still struggling to recognize
For years, engineers have raced to program artificial intelligence to recognize the scenarios that human drivers understand implicitly — like the difference between a shadow, a puddle and a pothole.
But their efforts to propel self-driving cars into the mainstream have sometimes had disastrous results, such as the death of a jaywalker last year.
“It was the first known fatality from self-driving vehicles,” tech reporter Faiz Siddiqui says. “And there was a lot of interest in the subject, because the tech industry has staked the future on this idea of self-driving.”
More on this topic:
- What self-driving cars can’t recognize may be a matter of life and death
- How does an autonomous car work? Not so great.
- Hottest job in China’s hinterlands: Teaching AI to tell a truck from a turtle
- Silicon Valley pioneered self-driving cars. But some of its tech-savvy residents don’t want them tested in their neighborhoods.
Attica Locke left Hollywood screenwriting to write novels. Now she’s doing both.
Attica Locke went to Hollywood with big ambitions: “She wanted to be a director and writer in Hollywood,” says Post Reports executive producer Madhulika Sikka.
But when Locke got there, it didn’t work out as she had hoped. There was no appetite for her voice, she says, and nobody wanted to produce the movies she was hired to write — black stories helmed by black characters. She toiled away in L.A. as a writer for hire before quitting, mortgaging her home and writing a successful novel.
Then, something changed in Hollywood, and she was back as a writer/producer for the hit Fox show “Empire.” Since then, she has released her fifth crime novel, “Heaven, My Home,” and is writing screenplays for Netflix and Hulu shows, proving that there is a demand for stories about black characters — on the page and on the screen.
More on this topic:
- Attica Locke left Hollywood to write novels. Now she’s found success in both worlds.
- ‘Bluebird, Bluebird’: No black-and-white answers in this tale of race and murder
A former presidential nominee's plan for Thanksgiving leftovers
In 2015, writer Matt Viser reported on Michael Dukakis's passion for preserving turkey carcasses. “It was one of my favorite stories, I think, over my entire career in journalism,” Viser said.
The former Massachusetts governor and one-time Democratic presidential nominee was said, each year, to collect Thanksgiving turkey carcasses to make soup for his extended family for the year to come.
“Throwing out a turkey carcass is sinful,” Dukakis said at the time. “It’s a terrible thing to do. There’s so much richness and goodness in a turkey carcass.”
More on this topic:
Previous Episode
Neena Satija on the tensions underlying a major piece of criminal justice legislation. Amber Phillips outlines what comes next in the impeachment process. And Antonia Noori Farzan describes how one town is addressing its “food desert.”
Tuesday, November 26, 2019
Next Episode
Katie Mettler unpacks the complicated life of black activist James Stern and how he came to take control of Jeff Schoep’s neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement.
Friday, November 29, 2019
End of carousel