ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

IDEAS

Can Anyone Make Awards Season Safe For Introverts?

"Creative introverts dread campaign season. They’re allergic to the self-promotion. Not to mention that the world is designed to reward extroverts. ... But you can’t reap the harvest in awards season if you don’t plant seeds." - MSN (Los Angeles Times)

How Does Instagram Stack Up As A News Feed?

Young users "said that relevance and proximity were key to defining news, but that relevance was personal and individual rather than public, and that proximity was emotional rather than geographical. And subjectivity was considered more desirable than objectivity." - Nieman Lab

Why The NYT Really Sued OpenAI

The New York Times is "spending a fortune creating what’s unfortunately now called content - the articles, investigative pieces, analysis, puzzles, recipes, product recommendations and more that make up ... a newspaper. OpenAI is just taking the fruits of that labor, that newspaper, to train their technology." - Slate

What’s Next For Those Dancing Robots? Thinking

If you look at the reaction to our robots, humanoids get 10 times the reaction to anything else. So if you care about people responding, you have to care about that. We got fantastic reaction to the “Do You Love Me” video, and contrary to what some people think, we did it for pure fun. - Wired

The Character Motivations Behind Giving Things Up

There is the giving up that we can admire and aspire to, and the giving up that profoundly unsettles us. What, for example, does real hope or real despair require us to relinquish? What exactly do we imagine we are doing when we give something up? - The Guardian

Our Story About Human Civilization Advancement Turns Out Not To Be Right. Time To Correct

The more societies we look at, the more it falls to pieces. Confronted with inconvenient evidence, we are being forced to retell our own origin story. In doing so, we are also rethinking what a society can be. - New Scientist

The Data Are Clear: Work Less, Be More Productive

If a four-day workweek were made the federal standard, working less would no longer be a disruptive experiment undertaken by a few startups. Instead, it would be an option that employers would have to justify not offering—a justification that might become harder to sustain as more studies indicate the potential benefits of fewer workdays. - The New Yorker

AI Can Produce Human-like Art. It’s a Challenge For Humans To Do Better

If you believe that culture is an imaginative human endeavor, then there should be nothing to fear, except that — what do you know? — a lot of humans have not been imagining anything more substantial. - The New York Times

Why Do Some People’s Personalities Change Over Time And Other Do Not?

Typically, most personality changes occur in young and older adulthood, with middle age appearing to be the period of the greatest stability. Changes in personality can be driven by the natural ageing process or the influence of external factors, such as major life events and daily interactions with other people. - Psyche

The Real Peril For Elite Universities

They will remain rich and powerful, and they will continue to have many bright and competent people working within their ambit. And yet their authority will grow more brittle and their appeal more sectarian.  - Compact Magazine

The Free Speach Wars Are A Trap

It is worth remembering the vast majority of what we call free-speech issues have little basis in the First Amendment, which only forbids the abridgment of speech by the government, not private organizations like magazines, cultural centers, or Hollywood production companies. - New York Magazine

Why Do Ancient Tablets Have Information About Modern Physics?

This newly discovered connection between ancient Mesopotamian writing and modern physics is more than an amusing academic fluke. - Salon

Why Oh Why — How We Orient Ourselves In The World

Among all the questions that enable us to orient ourselves in the world and in our common lives – who? what? how many? where? when? – this one, “why?“ seems necessary for a certain meaning to emerge, whatever the sense we give to the word. - 3 Quarks Daily

Fear Not The Deepfakes. They Arise From A Long Tradition

There is "value of parody and satire in human communication. This is a very old format for making a social critique, often used quite strategically. A really famous case which predates the internet is Jonathan Swift’s (1729) pamphlet, “A Modest Proposal.” - Nautilus

AI Is Coming For Culture

A.I. fans argue that if artists ignore ethical questions and embrace A.I., we could produce more. “A.I. could help you write 100 books in a year!” they say. My question is always: Will A.I. produce 100 times as many readers? - The New Republic

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