A professor of political science writes that there's “extensive research finding correlations between one’s tendency to believe in the bootstraps version of the American Dream and exposure to shows like America’s Got Talent, American Idol, and Shark Tank.” - Salon
“In the cutthroat world of food social media, recipe photos need to look not just good but incredible. People eat with their eyes, and that applies doubly when they’re choosing recipes to make from a vast online catalog that can often feel overwhelming.” - Slate
Maybe - but no sarcasm, please. "We already have umpteen animated takedowns – Robot Chicken’s fever-dream dismemberments, Family Guy’s fart-laced remakes – and they’re fine, in their way.” But not from the franchise itself. - The Guardian (UK)
Psychological studies have long shown how memories can be shaped by cues, doctored images, or repeated misinformation. What AI adds is scale and precision. - 3 Quarks Daily
It was simply that, when people who once functioned on a need-to-know basis were all of a sudden forced to adjudicate all of the information all of the time, the default heuristic was just to throw in one’s lot with the generally like-minded. - The New Yorker
Colour, as many people understand it, is the property of a thing. That light is green. The sky is blue. But scientifically, that’s not quite true. No one can experience the exact same colour as you do. Colour is a perceptual experience created by our brains. - The Conversation
Venturing even a tiny bit beyond the red edge of the rainbow, into the undiscovered country of the infrared, is a transformative experience: it reveals an entire hidden Universe, a previously walled-off layer of reality that we are now exploring every day as results pour in from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). - Aeon
Rutger Bregman, 37, is a Dutch historian who has written best-selling books arguing that the world is better (mostly meaning wealthier, healthier and more humane) than we’re typically led to believe, and also that further improving it is easily within our reach. - The New York Times
In the vast majority of education systems, you still see these disciplinary and coercive roots very embedded in the character of how schools today continue to operate. - Asterisk
There is a lot of happy talk among gerontologists about how people can remain open to new ideas and able to reinvent their lives late in life, and that certainly happens with some individuals. But the truth of the matter is that fundamental change in mental outlooks becomes much less likely with age. - Persuasion
Even when we criticise individualism, we remain entrenched in individualist modes of thinking. Liberal and conservative, religious or secular, hip-hop or punk or country – in countries like the US, these are merely different names for the competing brands by which individuals define themselves. - Aeon
The art schools were easy to get into and their teachers were well regarded. The schools’ core view was that the postwar world would be creative, incorporating a number of disciplines. Their graduates would be in tune with culture. - The Wall Street Journal
Small wonder that the “Odyssey," a staple of the Western canon and the progenitor of so much, from sci-fi to rom-com, has been enjoying a bump in popularity of late. - The New York Times
Whether the still relatively young values of liberalism will survive, whether reading and writing will continue to be the underpinnings of culture, whether the constructs and algorithms of AI will replace the freedoms of selfhood, whether we will dominate and destroy nature or salvage and protect it: We now stand before these questions. - Washington Post
