Travel gets branded as an achievement: see interesting places, have interesting experiences, become interesting people. Is that what it really is? - The New Yorker
Elizabeth Alexander: Art "has to start from a place of finding the truth: What is the light that you’re trying to share? Then, what does your craft allow you to do with it? I think what is beautiful contains within it human exchange." - Fast Company
"What we find, then, is what we’ve previously called 'generalized skepticism,' whereby people are skeptical of all forms of news selection, whether done by humans or by algorithms." So ... er ... should we ask dogs and cats to do this work? - Nieman Lab
"Bronzes of arms, feet, ears and other body parts ... the various ailments that were treated at the thermal baths." And then there are two bronze plaques with a "'very accurate' depiction of internal organs." - The New York Times
The whole point about academic freedom: the freedom to exercise academic expertise in order to discriminate between good and bad ideas, valid and invalid arguments, sound and hare-brained methods. This is what academics do when we curate syllabuses, make appointments, allocate graduate places and funding, peer-review papers and books, and invite speakers. - London Review
Some 19th-century artists saw the advent of photography as a threat to painting. Instead of replacing painting, however, photography eventually liberated it from realism, giving rise to Impressionism and the Modern Art movement. - Science
“We have seemingly been hardwired with a number of cognitive biases that impede our ability to take appropriate action to address seemingly distant, gradual and complex challenges such as climate change.” - The Guardian
You imagine the American city in the 1940s and ’50s and you think so many challenges being confronted—substandard housing, deindustrialization, racial strife, pollution—all this stuff is going on, and yet city leaders are obsessed with parking? But in fact they are. - Wired
We fail all the time, in things large and small, yet our biggest failure may be that, as a rule, we don’t understand failure. And since we are not equipped to think about it, we can’t grasp its broader significance in our lives. - Psyche
As the world became almost unfathomably strange, many people reacted by demanding seriousness; social and political critics understandably turned very sober. And this too marginalized satire, which addresses serious issues by mocking them. - 3 Quarks Daily
In a culture that demands overcoming against all odds, even failure has been commodified by the American self-help industrial complex: rebranded not as a devastating and possibly life-altering event but as a blip en route to a chest-thumping achievement, accomplishment, or acquisition. - Yale Review
A big collection of archival data, going back all the way to 1949, suggests people believe morality is declining. People are asked questions like, “Do you think morality is declining?” and “Do you think people are less honest today than they were 50 years ago?” in 100 different ways, in dozens of different countries. - Nautilus
‘Can art make me become a good person?’ is a more interesting question, because neither ‘Yes’ nor ‘No’ is an adequate answer; the only viable answer, really, is ‘It depends.’ Nevertheless, people will persist in saying simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. - Dublin Review of Books
"Today, for the first time in history, thanks to artificial intelligence, it is possible for anybody to make counterfeit people who can pass for real" Is that right? Anybody? - 3 Quarks Daily
"The findings suggest that the brain likely uses different mechanisms for encoding and representing these two different volumes of voices when there is a background conversation ongoing." - New Scientist
