ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

IDEAS

The Coddling Of The Undergraduate?

To have such solicitous faculty on hand to advocate for students’ interests is, depending on how you look at it, either wonderfully supportive or repulsively infantilizing. - Hedgehog Review

We’re Obsessed With Stories About The End Of The World. But Then We Always Have Been

Evidently, the time is ripe for a survey of the branch of cultural production concerned with the end of the world. And yet, tales have been told about it for as long as we’ve been doing story. - Literary Review

We All Have Rights, Right? Well…

 The idea that we have rights is an unquestioned certainty, but rights are also often a source of considerable conflict in the modern world. Which rights do we actually possess? Do animals have rights? - 3 Quarks Daily

We’re Obsessed With Dystopias Of The Future. What About Protopias?

Protopias, on the other hand, are achievable. They present a realistic, better tomorrow. But even the protopian visions of more recent iterations of Star Trek, she notes, do not necessarily grapple with our most immediate crises. - NPR

Our Achievement Culture Is Not Healthy

In the contemporary world, the self is no longer a subject but a project. The self is something to be optimised, to be maximised, to be made efficient, cultivated for its capacity for productive output. The worry is that all life activities become viewed as lines on a résumé. - Psyche

The False Promises Of Being More Productive

Time was the problem, I assumed: There was enough of it; I just wasn’t using it right. Or maybe the problem was my attention span. I couldn’t focus. - Esquire

Today Isn’t The Only Day To Avoid Getting Tricked Online

Hinst for fake-info spotting every day of the year: “Stop when you see something that's 'too good to be true, or too crazy to be believable, or too-anger inducing.’” - NPR

Julia Louis-Dreyfus Thinks We Should Be Listening To Older Women All Year Long

In pursuit of info, the first season of the actor’s podcast “featured guests like Carol Burnett (90), Isabel Allende (81) and Darlene Love (82). The second ... includes Julie Andrews (88), Patti Smith (77) and Ina Garten (76).” That’s many years of accumulated ideas, and, sometimes, wisdom. - The New York Times

Facebook Is Cutting Its News Tab For Those In The US And Australia

The feature debuted in 2019, and has already been cut in France, Germany, and the U.K. "The change comes as tries to scale back news and political content on its platforms following years of criticism about how it handles misinformation.” - Chicago Sun-Times (AP)

We’re In A Golden Age Of Campy TV Shows

“We are positively drowning in shows about the glitzy world of the well-to-do that I can only—facetiously, of course—describe as being catnip for a gay man with a streaming subscription." - Slate

Ten Typical Behaviors Of Creative People

Creative people are uncomfortable with the status quo. For them, a creative life is one of options, opportunities, and alternatives. They do not always accept what others do; rather, they seek multiple responses and views. - Psychology Today

The AI-Created Junk Polluting Our Culture

It’s unclear what the ethical line is between scam and regular usage. Some A.I.-generated scams are easy to identify, like the medical journal paper featuring a cartoon rat sporting enormous genitalia. Many others are more insidious, like the mislabeled and hallucinated regulatory pathway. - The New York Times

For Centuries The Dutch Have Fought Back The Water. In Climate Change Maybe Cities Float Above The Water?

 “I think some bowls should be full,” he said, suggesting that flooding the land would amount to little more than a natural evolution of a man-made system, not unlike the way skyscrapers transformed cities a century ago. “It’s just an update to the machine.” - The New Yorker

Toymakers Design Human Characteristics Into Their Work. And AI?

Large language models can seem to do more than what we ask them to; they exhibit something that we might call creativity if a human did it. What is actually happening in these moments? - The New Yorker

How Your “Digital Twin” Will Change The World

In the last decade, thanks to advances in AI, the internet of things, machine learning and sensor technologies, the fantasy of digital twins has taken off. BMW has created a digital twin of a production plant in Bavaria. Boeing is using digital twins to design airplanes. - Noema

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