Landlines are making a slightly abashed return. “The phone itself is a sleek black with gold trim, and the cord connecting the receiver is all coiled up—just like the ones I grew up with back in the ’90s.” - Maclean's
It’s "a nearly three-hour barn burner, racing from event to event with whirlwind kinetic energy. … Nolan’s reluctance to take a pause should, actually, give us pause. After all, Homer’s poem doesn’t just involve a lot of waiting. It is a postwar tale about waiting.” - Boston Globe
This doesn’t sound like a very nice life, does it? It’s an existence in which you’re micromanaged and surveilled, given almost no freedom or privacy, and put under constant pressure while, at the same time, being seen as incompetent and lazy. - The New Yorker
These same dons disdained Britain’s provincial universities—known pejoratively as Redbrick—as well as academics in the U.S., whom they scorned for going about their business with “woefully unnecessary seriousness.” A don, by contrast, was effortlessly successful. - The Wall Street Journal
Journalist Nicholas Carr called the online world “the shallows” for the way it erodes concentration. But the paradox is that its depthlessness arrives as immersion. - The Walrus
From the battlefields of Europe to middle-class households and sex trafficking, women’s logistics has one thing in common: performing organisational and supply work for men who have capital, status and control. - Psyche
The act of writing is an act of thinking, and to automate our paragraphs is to populate our screens with words without filling our minds with the ideas necessary to conceive of them. - Derek Thompson
The entire architecture of digital life – with its algorithmic feeds, frictionless production and the ambient expectation that we should be consuming or optimising at all times – nudges us towards chasing outputs rather than generating meaning. - Aeon
For the first hour or so, I found the Robot Games enthralling. What can robots already do, and where do they still fall short? Which robot will manage to crawl under an obstacle, and which will pitifully get stuck? But after a while, I suddenly realized that I had grown deeply bored. - Yascha Mounk
The authors don’t actually exist, but are instead names that large language models repeatedly produce when tasked with generating experts in certain fields. - 404 Media
There were ups and downs in the stories I saw people telling, but the trajectory I observed most frequently was an upward one. Growth, expansion, improvement, overcoming. Vacations as burnishments to the image. Illnesses as stress tests, ways of ultimately proving fitness. - The Walrus
The difference between private knowledge, even when widely shared, and common knowledge is not a mere logical nicety. It can unify knowers in coordinated action and sometimes explode a social status quo. - Persuasion
In one moment, you see children playing on the grass, and you are genuinely moved. In the second moment, you see the children playing, and you think how nice it would be to be moved. The latter is the substance of kitsch. - 3 Quarks Daily
