ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

IDEAS

Physical Media Is Becoming Cool Again

Whether it’s thanks to Gen-Z or thanks to a (terrifying) nonstop surveillance state intertwined with our televisions and speakers, CDs and DVDs are making a comeback. - Washington Post (Yahoo)

A Startup Wants To Relaunch Twitter

The group Operation Bluebird claims Elon Musk’s X has legally abandoned Twitter (not to mention the word “tweet”), and wants to relaunch. If you “reserve your handle" at twitter dot new, you’ll even see a surprise hashtag. - Ars Technica

The Definitive Oral History Of How Jim Carrey’s Grinch Movie Really Did Steal Christmas

The rewriters who didn’t get a credit: “The way that Writers Guild arbitration process works is that if you arbitrate for credit and you don’t get credit, the Writers Guild forbids what they call compensatory credit. … Jim Carrey’s dentist has a credit on this movie, and we don’t.” - Vulture

What Happens To You Creatively After You’ve Won Success?

These big breaks and large prizes are remarkable things that can provide incredible opportunities, but there is so often another side to that success. - LA Review of Books

The Benefits Of Tolerant Cultures

A tolerant person is one who does not interfere with other people, even if he thinks they are wrong, but is prepared to let them think what they like and say what they think. If he thinks they are wrong, he may try to persuade them, but he will not try to force them. - Psyche

Americans’ Obsession With Renovation And Makeovers — And The White House

The White House has explained the East Wing’s demolition as “renovation,” and the necessary prelude to a multimillion-dollar ballroom. This is the architectural equivalent of a celebrity-style makeover: a redo to admire as a luxury commodity, an old building rejuvenated, history erased. - The New York Times

The People Who Are Using AI To Do Their Thinking

For this set of compulsive users, AI has become a primary interface through which they interact with the world. The emails they write, the life decisions they make, and the questions that consume their mind all filter through AI first. “It’s like a real addiction.” - The Atlantic

What If Laziness And Apathy Have Neurological Causes?

When these systems become dysfunctional, people who were once highly motivated can become pathologically apathetic. Whereas previously they might have been curious, highly engaged and productive – at work, in their social lives and in their creative thinking – they can suddenly seem like the opposite. - The Guardian

Why Are We Curious About Some Things And Not Others?

All this infophilia raises an important question: if we like information so much, why don’t we seek out more of it? - Psyche

Struggling To Define Intelligence: What Does It Take?

We are running out of intelligence tests that humans can pass reliably and AI models cannot. By those benchmarks, and if we accept that intelligence is essentially computational — the view held by most computational neuroscientists — we must accept that a working ‘simulation’ of intelligence actually is intelligence. - Nature

How New York’s Culture Shaped Its New Mayor

“Long before he became an unlikely political force, Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani was just another 20-something trying to squeeze a laugh out of his Saturday improv class in Manhattan.” - The New York Times

Don’t Put Hannah Arendt On A Pedestal

“Nearly a year into a second Trump presidency and 50 years after Arendt’s death, she is still routinely invoked as the key to understanding our moment. It’s been a strange afterlife for an idiosyncratic thinker who believed that politics was inherently contingent and unpredictable.” - The New York Times

The Notion Of Decline Of Our Education System Is A Long-Running Trope

The suspicion that Americans are becoming more illiterate has long been irresistible to the educated class. In the present day, this happens to be objectively true. But across time and cultures, we hear the alarm of declinism. - The Atlantic

Fascinating: Research Find That Fantastical Programming Impairs Cognitive Attention In Children

The researchers found a significant negative effect for fantastical content. Children who watched programs featuring impossible events tended to perform worse on attention and executive function tasks immediately afterward. - PsyPost

The Importance Of Style In Science

Style, as I see it, is much more idiosyncratic and manifests in scientists who may practice in the same field and utilize similar methods, but who nonetheless differ in the way they conduct and produce their work. - Undark

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