While most retailers today assume that consumers want ever greater assortment, Costco’s popularity speaks to a countervailing desire for less choice. Indeed, the pre-selection of items for sale in their warehouses is part of the value proposition. - The Walrus
Burnout’s meaning shifted from literal to figurative over time. It began as a description of candles burning out or fuel being used up, then shifted to a barn burning down and a worker’s energy or body being depleted in the rebuilding. Eventually it came to simply describe a worker’s exhaustion. - The Conversation
How do all other norms—our morals, our ethics, our sense of what is good for us and for others—change when we continually imagine ourselves to be living in a universal room with everybody else? - Derek Thompson
Using Nhandeflix, "users can find Guarani cultural productions like Roda Cutia (a Guarani children’s song), Bicicletas de Nhanderú (a documentary about a Guarani-Mbya town in southern Brazil), … and Como a noite apareceu (a fictional film based on a Guarani legend).” - El País English
"There are a number of panels in the app, and the layout is confusing. The service constantly tracks your activity. The app also seems to have an odd hostility to playing actual albums.” And now? Auto-playing music videos. - Wired
But mail-order catalogs might make a comeback, thanks to Millennial and Gen-Z nostalgia. "There’s a stark contrast between the frantic sense of urgency online retail often whips up ... and the catalog’s invitation to flip, peruse, think, rethink — basically, to shop deliberately rather than reflexively.” - Salon
AI can now generate songs, images, novels and artworks in seconds. Many of these works are already being streamed, licensed and sold. This raises an increasingly important question: should works produced without direct human authorship receive copyright protection? - The Conversation
How, then, could an automated oracle help? It cannot tell you what to feel, because feeling is not something you can summon by obedience. But neither can it settle the matter by telling you what to do. Reasons matter, and to be a morally responsible agent you must reason for yourself. - Humanist Review
Which change that happened 15 years ago was the real source of so much misery for children? “You can’t run experiments on history,” Haidt said, so we’ll never be able to prove that smartphones and social media caused the steep decline in youth mental health. - The Atlantic
In a nationally representative survey conducted by our team at the Archbridge Institute’s Human Flourishing Lab, 68% of Gen Z respondents reported feeling nostalgic for eras before their lifetime, and 73% said they are drawn to media, styles, hobbies, or traditions from earlier periods. - Big Think
We human beings remain stubbornly, beautifully starving for one another. More surprising — and heartening — we are looking upward and outward, and returning to one another after being tethered for so long to our screens. This all portends well for the entertainment business, no doubt. - The New York Times
We have found that although AI can enhance individual creativity, it reduces collective creativity. To explain why this occurs, we should first clarify what we mean by creativity. - MIT
Over and over again, Americans choose to sever bonds that connect us with each other: We move away from our hometowns, we leave our churches, we quit our unions, we quit our parties, we stay in instead of going out, we donate instead of volunteering, we let friendships fade away. - Matt Pearce
“What Is an Author?” predicted a future where old ideas about authorship would give way to new questions about technology and power. “What are the modes of existence of this discourse?” Foucault asked. “Where does it come from, how is it circulated” and — perhaps most important — “who controls it?” - The New York Times
