We ask for help from artificial customer service representatives. Some of us accept friend requests from bots and are, thereafter, influenced by the content they post. This is a momentous change to the nature of the public square. - 3 Quarks Daily
If Canada wants its cultural policy to survive the age of slop, it will have to insist that what claims to be human—and Canadian—be verified as such. Sovereignty, in this context, is not just about protecting domestic production from foreign influence. - The Walrus
It’s far worse: It does wrong by Shakespeare. "Hamnet changes many details and events in Shakespeare’s life to tell its story, but it is in its prestigeiness that it truly does Shakespeare dirty.” - Slate
“Even if tiny mics are a trend that’s crossed over from influencer culture, they’ve become yet another obnoxious staple of the film industry that favors a viewer’s pleasure over decorum. Not everything needs to be kitsch, dumbed down, or turned into a competitive status symbol.” - Salon
“The pamphlet changed the way Americans viewed government. Beginning with an origin story that echoed John Locke’s ‘Second Treatise of Government,’ Paine depicted people originally created free and equal in nature and subsequently forming representative governments to better secure their liberty and happiness.” - Salon
There is no longer a crisis in the humanities. Our field’s long-running narrative of continuous crisis is over. The bad news: The crisis of the humanities has been revealed by the events of the last year to be a crisis of civil society writ large. - Chronicle of Higher Education
Value capture occurs when you get your values from some external source and let them rule you without adapting them.” Because we live in a world in which nearly everything is quantified and ranked, value capture is everywhere. - The New Yorker
We have discovered that writing about local places that people are already connected to changes this dynamic and gives people a way to examine their own assumptions within a recognisable framework. - The Conversation
At odds with the outspoken desire for that which is novel and original in art, audiences also have a hunger for the familiar or at least the spectacularly plausible. If the future can’t be predicted, then maybe it can be gamed out, run through a series of thought experiments. - The Baffler
Across the show floor, the car emerged less as a machine and more as a companion as automakers and tech companies showcased vehicles that can adapt to drivers and passengers in real time — from tracking heart rates and emotions to alerting if a baby or young child is accidentally left in the car. - Fast Company
In an age in which information on the internet is so abundant and so low-quality that it’s essentially noise, job number one is to fight our evolutionary instinct to absorb all available information, and instead filter out unreliable sources and bad data. - The Wall Street Journal
Our consciousness roams, it can be focused on the here and now, or maybe the there and then, but it is always focused on something. Yet the experience of lulls in consciousness content challenges this assumption. - Psyche
Truth and trust are often treated as virtues, but they function as conditions: the prerequisites for coherent societies, functional institutions, and stable international systems. Without them, even the most advanced technologies fail to deliver progress. - Time
Domed screens, with comfortable seats and bar food, are actually the present for some (sports) fans. But the test run was “when the domed screen transformed into a high-resolution recreation of Michelangelo’s fresco paintings in the Sistine Chapel.” - The New York Times
