Against the suggestion that the furor over phones is no different from past outcries over new technologies, some point to novel features of social media—exploitative algorithms or “infinite scrolling”—to argue that this case is different. - Boston Review
Each of us had imagined a life that exceeded the border and acted upon that imagination. In that sense, the prison did not simply contain border-crossers; it brought together people whose aspirations had collided with the territorial imaginary of the nation-state. - Aeon
Your bank’s app is down. The pharmacy cannot pull up your prescription. Your paycheck is late because the payroll company unplugged its system to be safe. None of it is a catastrophe on its own. All of it, every week, is a different country from the one we live in now. - Washington Post
Curiosity was seen as a largely vacuous interest in novel or forbidden information. The curious person was thought to reach for what was hidden and secret, beyond their proper purview, and thereby isolate themselves from spiritual and social community. - MIT Reader
This very obvious fact about the world – that things exist – can shift from seeming mundane and trivial to very surprising, even downright weird. - Aeon
Remember that the brain itself is merely another object in the world. To talk about it at all is to have already accepted a level of objective existence which cannot be reduced to sensory experience. - 3 Quarks Daily
It’s increasingly clear to me that we will not survive as a society without some seismic intervention that separates us from our screens, our algorithms, and our little simulacra of social life. - The New Yorker
Today, it’s evident that the word ‘equality’ means very different things to different people. What once seemed capable of providing common ground is now just another source of controversy. What explains this shift? - Aeon
"Is the value of my experience at Disney World undermined by the fact that it is, at the end of the day, a production of the Walt Disney Company? Can I trust a profit-hungry corporation to teach my children universal values? - Psyche
We usually assume that more of it must be better. But we can become so focused on improving one thing that we lose sight of the others. You can try to arrange your calendar so that every minute is accounted for, but you’ll soon start running over and end up behind. - The Guardian
“With a world model, you give it a visual state of the world, an image, and it will then predict the next visual state of the world.” These 3D generations can be used as digital training grounds. “They’re simulations, but they look and feel real.” - Wired
If democracy is the political system that allows the fullest human flourishing, the novel is the literary form that most fully cultivates our understanding of human possibility and tragedy and endurance. - The Atlantic
"Like the typed version, it does not include the words 'I have a dream,' part of the ringing second half of the speech that King famously improvised." - The New York Times
