IDEAS

The Philosophers Attempting To Explain This Baffling Time

That must have been revelatory at a time when most people seemed to believe that science was infallible. But expertise has been downgraded—and more people are getting their information from podcasters and influencers. Who could help us understand this shift? - The Atlantic

A Monolith Built To Record The End Of Planet Earth

“The purpose of the device is to provide an unbiased account of the events that lead to the demise of the planet, hold accountability for future generations, and inspire urgent action,” the Earth’s Black Box website states. “How the story ends is completely up to us.” - Gizmodo

Smart Phones Enable An Awful Lot Of Fact-Checking – Sometimes To Our Detriment

“There is something thrilling about a document dump, and picking through boxes and boxes of government files. We have often associated these habits with conspiracy theorists, ... but in the modern era of digitized records, anyone can jump down a rabbit hole anywhere, anytime, even on their phone." - The Atlantic

Have Movies Doomed Us All?

Seriously: Movies have "proved to be a tool of dictators, an instrument of propaganda and the weapon of ruthless, unaccountable corporate interests.” - The New York Times

Have Our Devices Dulled Our Sensory Experiences?

"The way we consume such content, by swiping idly on a glass screen, stands in stark contrast with the content of the content, the skillful manipulation of resolutely tangible material. It’s ironic, and a bit dystopian, this disjuncture, but I’m entranced by the videos anyway." - The New Yorker

Last Remaining Chinese Theatre In America Seeks Emergency Funding

City records describe it as a 410-seat performing arts and film theater and the last remaining Chinese theater in any Chinatown in the United States. The theater at 636 Jackson St. opened in 1925 as the Great China Theater for Chinese opera. Over the decades, it also became a movie house and community gathering place. - San Francisco Chronicle

Why Writers Should Embrace AI

AI may well be terrible news for software engineers, but I think it’s an intriguing development for people who care about language and ideas – precisely the people who currently reject it the most. - Aeon

What Literature Teaches Us About Neurodivergence

Far from being a modern phenomenon, neurodivergence has a long history. In other words, people whose ways of thinking, sensing or behaving differed from social expectations have always existed. Members of my research project have described discovering these historical figures as like finding neurodivergent ancestors. - The Conversation

The Philosophical Consequences Of Simulations

Students tend to have a low tolerance for fanciful hypotheses and abstruse thought experiments. All but the most philosophically inclined roll their eyes at Descartes’s famed “evil demon” scenario in which the reader is meant to reflect on whether any of her beliefs couldn’t have been presented as a deception of a malevolent spirit. - Hedgehog Review

New Brain Study Reveals How Bilingual People Process Language

When deciding how to make a word singular or plural, for instance, bilingual people exhibit strikingly similar brain activity regardless of whether they are speaking in their first or second language. - The New York Times

Why Older People Are Happier, And What We Can Learn From Them

Research spanning 145 countries has identified a U-shaped happiness-age curve, whereby self-reported wellbeing tends to dip in mid-adulthood and peak in old age. - Psyche

“Teaser” Events Have Become A Powerful Way For Pop Stars To Introduce Their Projects

From a marketing perspective, this approach blends internet culture and storytelling to create a memorable experience for fans. These teaser releases are particularly effective at generating fan theories, sparking speculation, creating memes and helping create stories with fans. - The Conversation

Mathematics And The Tools Of Reasoning That Ai Is Tackling

Understanding is a lively topic for philosophers, but not for the tech industry. In their race to the ultimate prize of AGI, Silicon Valley’s main players instead see the mechanization of reasoning as the main hurdle. For them, mathematics is the supreme AI challenge because it is the purest form of reasoning. - Boston Review

Jurgen Habermas And The Public Sphere

Habermas’s death might mark the end of a mode of main-stage philosophizing that, in the German-speaking world, reaches back, by way of Adorno, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Marx, Schopenhauer, and Hegel, to Kant himself. - The New Yorker

The Aesthetic That Fits Our Times: Tragicomic

This cockroach of forms—adaptive, resilient, unkillable—was named by the Roman dramatist Plautus in the second century BC, enjoyed its heyday in 17th-century Renaissance theater, and was revived in the 20th century to describe a slurry of existential despair and absurd farce. - ARTnews

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