"We urbanites, who dwell in the medium of public political discussion, also live in the element of opinion. Leo Strauss loved to intimate that a few of us could instead live in the element of knowledge, as if he were hanging up a shingle that read ‘Secrets, this way!’ The irony of saying such a thing in public is...
With VR evolving at its current rate, movie nights or game nights could eventually turn into cyber nights, a new norm for those under 35. Games would no longer need to be marketed towards one group or identity, and would enable a more casual audience to approach virtual worlds without the traditional complexities. For more experienced audiences, this would...
It was a Cambridge professor of literature, almost a century ago in the aftermath of World War I, who pioneered a view of cognition we can recognize as strikingly modern, and who appreciated what we are only now beginning to rediscover: the great potential of interactions between the narrative arts and brain science. - Nautilus
The students who used the Aboriginal memory technique were three times more likely to remember the entire list than they were before they were trained in this type of recall. The memory palace group were about twice as likely to recall the whole list, and the control group only improved by 50%. - Cosmos
While the number of visitors remains below the threshold, tourists use services and provisions designed for residents. Once this threshold is crossed, however, residents are forced to use services designed for tourists. - Daily Beast
To be burned out is to be used up, like a battery so depleted that it can’t be recharged. In people, unlike batteries, it is said to produce the defining symptoms of “burnout syndrome”: exhaustion, cynicism, and loss of efficacy. Around the world, three out of five workers say they’re burned out. A 2020 U.S. study put that figure...
"There is another thing the rest of us, the audience, do not fully appreciate: the crisis is rooted in the destruction that was visited upon the arts even before the pandemic—that is, in the scandal of free content, which has been going on for more than twenty years and which implicates us all." - Harper's
"When you aggregate hundreds of predictions, the result is a special, concentrated kind of wrong. Everyone was trying their best, and everyone missed. And these 40-year-old predictions don’t seem wrong in the fun, steampunk way that, say, late Victorian predictions of personal blimps or hot-air-ballooning robots might seem wrong. They’re just saggy middle-aged predictions." - Wired
Two geology professors built a 3D replica of Sardinia, and it worked so well (including providing a vital connection for lonely, isolated students to socialize) that one of the profs then "spent three weeks in the Scottish Highlands, driving around and taking loads of drone shots, which he used to recreate the landscape around the village of Kinlochleven, another...
The one thing movie crew members - at least the vaccinated ones - can give up is face shields. One guild member says, "As the studios have negotiated the way forward with the unions and there are still insurance risk factors for studios and production companies, it’s not really up to us as individuals — if we want to...
"Abusers are often shielded not only by this “myth of authenticity,” but by another myth, which pervades all the performing arts, and indeed all the other arts as well. This is an age-old myth, at least as old as Romanticism. The myth is that the constraint of usual social norms and rules is bad for artists. They have to...
Calling a person an animal is usually a comment on their unrestrained appetites, especially for food (‘like a hungry animal’), for sex (‘they went at it like animals’), and for violence (‘they’re like wild animals’). We also have purpose-made insults comparing people to specific kinds of animal: pig, chicken, rat, cow, slug, snake, cockroach, bitch, etc. - Psyche
A war is on between the tech titans and a relentless generation of largely digital-native reporters looking to speak truth to power while racking up Twitter followers in the process. Depending on whom you ask, the great Tech vs. Media Standoff of 2020–21 is either a “fake fight” between “20 people and 500 other people,” all quick to take...
The goal is to "invite people who have not been thinking about this topic to really think about it in their day-to-day work. It really creates the culture of control, culture of responsibility and understanding." - Protocol
Perhaps it is that architects speak in a special language, and what looks to me like an arbitrary and ugly assortment of random stark rectangles is, to them, a kind of Morse code saying “Hello! Come inside! Happy to have you here.” But if that is the case, it doesn’t redeem the buildings for architects to have designed them...
