ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

IDEAS

Gen-Z’s Poor Mental Health Comes From Smartphone Culture. We Should Stop It

Once young people began carrying the entire internet in their pockets, available to them day and night, it altered their daily experiences and developmental pathways across the board. Friendship, dating, sexuality, exercise, sleep, academics, politics, family dynamics, identity—all were affected. - The Atlantic

AI – Understanding Versus Finding Patterns

How can these powerful systems beat us in chess but falter on basic math? This paradox reflects more than just an idiosyncratic design quirk. It points toward something fundamental about how large language models think. - The New Yorker

The Ideas Behind The Harlem Renaissance

That aggregation of talent, energy and audience created what felt like a moment of rupture and renewal, a chance to reinvent Black life and Black consciousness, to escape the self-imprisoning consciousness that Du Bois anatomized and the even more debilitating quiescence and accommodation advocated by Booker T. Washington. - Washington Post

Why Are Readers And Moviegoers So Obsessed With Stories Set In British Country Houses?

"These novels, films and TV shows set on grand estates strike us differently when most people can’t buy a flat. ... More than that, the Arcadian English ideal simply cannot survive when we discover slavery in the deeds.” And yet. - The Guardian (UK)

Will Bradley Cooper Ever Win An Oscar?

Maybe? Some suggestions for him - plus other one-week-later musings, including blaming a former Secretary of State for Barbie’s losses. - Vulture

The FCC Wants To Speed Up Our Internet

Broadband speed of 25 Millibytes per second (Mbps) for downloads and 3 Mbps for uploads isn’t it anymore - now the FCC says wants to more than quadruple each speed. (Gamers and those who have experienced buffering understand this all too well.) - Wired

Personality Typing Is A Multi-Billion-Dollar Business. Why Do We Want To Be Typed?

The self has never been more securely an object of classification than it is today, thanks to the century-long ascendence of behavioral analysis and scientific psychology, sociometry, taxonomic personology, and personality theory. - Hedgehog Review

What AI Is Learning About What Life Is

While some skeptics think the models are going to hit a wall, more optimistic scientists believe that foundation models will even tackle the biggest biological question of them all: What separates life from nonlife? - The New York Times

Today’s Journalists Come From A Different Economic Class. Here’s How It Changes Their Work

Contemporary journalists have a relationship to ideas that is more or less the opposite of the old school’s. It begins before they even get to campus. Students at elite colleges are drawn overwhelmingly from the upper classes, with roughly two-thirds coming from the top 20% of the income distribution. - Persuasion

AI Researchers Warn They’re Being Priced Out

Fei-Fei Li is at the forefront of a growing chorus of academics, policymakers and former employees who argue the sky-high cost of working with AI models is boxing researchers out of the field, compromising independent study of the burgeoning technology. - Washington Post

If We’re So Polarized, What Is The Culpability Of Technology?

So what is the ideology of the Internet? An optimist might invoke the idea of democratization, pointing to the medium’s ability to amplify otherwise silent voices, in ways both good and bad. But the Internet is not so much a forum as a language unto itself, one with its own history, predilections, and prejudices. - The New Yorker

The Gay Best Friend Was A Tired Trope, Sure, But Did He Really Need To Vanish Entirely?

“For a long time now, popular culture has been moving forward without a once-essential style accessory: the Gay Best Friend. We’re not supposed to mourn his absence; we’re not supposed to want him back. But I kind of do." - The New York Times

Past Lives Conveys So Much About The Immigrant Experience

"Like Nora, I had lofty dreams and thought of America as my salvation of sorts. The place where I could achieve things I’d never have an opportunity to experience in Iran. As I watched the movie nestled next to my Midwestern husband, I wondered … what did I sacrifice?" - HuffPost

The Woman Who Brought Libraries Online

The internet was hard to use in 1992 - there was no web browser, for instance - so "the service was mediated by local librarians, who would help library-goers take their baby steps online." - NPR

The Binge: Healthy Indulgence Or Destructive Behavior?

Here’s what has me perplexed: The word itself means doing something excessively, and to do anything excessively means doing it more than is reasonable or acceptable. If that’s still true and the English language hasn’t shifted just yet, then to binge means to do something too much. - The Smart Set

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