ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

IDEAS

Our Notions Of What Constitutes An “Adult” Are Changing

Setting aside their feelings about being an adult, what did people say defined adulthood for them? They in fact tended to place little emphasis on the traditional milestones of marriage and parenthood. Psyche

Our Complicated Interdependent Relationship With Machines

Human beings make machines, but machines remake human society, too. Reliable, spring-driven clocks enabled precision time measurement, forcing us into regimented daily schedules, but they also helped sailors calculate their positions at sea with far greater accuracy, leading to the first reliable maps. - The Wall Street Journal

Why It’s Good To Be Comfortable With Not Knowing

Those who shun the indefinite tend to see the world in shades of black and white, ignoring the gray. They are prone to jump to answers and are distressed by chaos and surprise. - Nautilus

Anodyne ChatBots Aren’t Very Useful – It’s Called The Spicy Mayo Problem

ChatGPT felt new because it was capable of something much like a discussion. You can start with a half-baked idea and develop it with the AI’s help, using it as an aid to your own creativity. However, with each iteration of ChatGPT, ever more questions generate a stock or evasive response. - The Atlantic

What Happened When My Family Disconnected From The Internet

"Without distractions, the days seemed to expand. We learned to harvest time, an idea that came to us in national forests across the U.S. We realized that days undisturbed by digital interruptions made time slow down and improved the quality of our time together." - The Atlantic

The Internet Feels Like It’s Getting Less True

But there are still ways to avoid deepfakes, scams, and false news. - Wired

Why Are There Suddenly So Many Sexual Assault Lawsuits Against Musicians?

The Adult Survivors Act expired in New York on Friday, and many alleged survivors got their cases in just under the wire. - Washington Post

The Tight Relationship Between Cookbooks And Gaming

A new Dragon Age cookbook "admittedly derives from well-worn Europe-centered fantasy tropes — you have your fantasy England, your fantasy France, your fantasy Roman Empire, your underground dwarves" - and their cheese, ham, and giant spider legs. - The Verge

How Admen And Psychologists Collaborated In The Early 20th Century To Monetize Our Attention

This marriage of convenience between American psychologists and American ad-men was a cozy connection warmed across the early decades of the twentieth century. - Asterisk

We Need To Redefine Work For A “Post-Work” World

Radical politics should aim for a world in which work’s social role is utterly transformed and highly attenuated—a world in which work can no longer serve as either a disciplining institution or the fulcrum for our social identities. - Boston Review

How Mass Culture Gave Rebellion To The Individual

How did we get here, where men who benefit most from our social structures, position themselves as the little guy? This comes from a longer history of political shifts in America and of the rise of mass cultural consumption as a means of political expression. - 3 Quarks Daily

Why Chasing Happiness Can Make You… Unhappy

Happiness is, after all, an abstract idea; there is no objective measure for it available. Many people don’t even know what they really mean by happiness: is it a state of general satisfaction? - Psyche

Are We Headed Into A New Romantic Age?

That’s the world, circa 1800. The new paradigm shocked Europe when it started to spread. Cultural elites had just assumed that science and reason would control everything in the future. But that wasn’t how it played out. - The Honest Broker

Redefining And Redeploying Expertise

The phenomenon is sped by automation, which usurps routine tasks, leaving employees to handle the nonroutine and unanticipated—and the continued advance of which throws the skills employers value into flux. It would be supremely ironic if the advance of the knowledge economy had the effect of devaluing knowledge. - The Atlantic

Will Gen-Z Bring About The End Of Dating Apps?

In a recent study, most college students "are forgoing regular app usage (79 percent) in favor of in-person connection." Time truly is a flat circle. - Wired

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