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
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
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
Samuel Moyn argues that the oldest Americans, because of their retrograde politics and ever-increasing presence, are profoundly reshaping our collective life. - The New Yorker
Music has a unique capability to engage multiple areas of the brain that can function in sync with one another. This includes areas involved in hearing and listening, movement, attention, language, emotion, memory and thinking. - The Conversation
Reading a book involves a complex series of mental tasks. A reader must decode words, interpret pictures, and connect new information to what they already know. To do this efficiently, the human brain builds what scientists call a story schema. - Psypost
After WWII, “single-family homes spread across the nation like fireweed. In a distinctively American architectural feature, many of them were joined to a small dungeon dedicated to the tidy storage of automobiles—and other items.” - The Atlantic
Gatekeeper, here, doesn’t mean the patriarchal bogeyman of progressive fever dreams. It means the picky curator who maintains a necessary membrane between your half-formed, typo-addled thoughts and the wider world. It means the tastemaker who triages opinions and batters the better ones into readable form. - The Walrus
On one side are texts produced before the arrival of generative LLMs. On the other, everything that has followed—texts that might still be useful, even compelling, but that will always face a lingering suspicion of not being entirely human, of having been smoothed by systems trained to predict the word that comes next. - LA Review of Books
The years from 2000 to 2025 as a period of creative emptiness and stagnation so intractable that it will be remembered (or, rather, is being remembered, through the anticipation of remembrance) as voided time, a dark age. - Yale Review
Our reigning cultural ideology has been poptimism—the idea that if a lot of people like a work of art, then it has to be good. Now sloptimism, which holds that if there’s a lot of art out there and people are engaging with it then how bad can it be? - The New Yorker
For decades, the beautiful game depended on the human eye: a scout on the sideline, attentively watching, waiting for that something special. That process, however, is becoming increasingly data-driven. - The Conversation
Among humans, “you can feel lonely at a party, or you can feel fine alone in your office." Whatever the ideal degree of togetherness, Tye and others think that an animal’s need to balance time alone and time with others represents a kind of homeostasis: an equilibrium that’s critical for survival. - Knowable
We have moved beyond the Information Age and are now firmly rooted in what I call the Imagination Era, a time when ideas and thinking differently are our primary currency. In this landscape, technology is not replacing our humanity; it is demanding that we deepen it. - Fast Company
