We need to work, because survival demands it, and we need to rest, because work is tiring, but are those two possibilities really exhaustive? - Liberties Journal
It is no longer enough for universities to say that their programmes allow you to explore some of the most fundamental questions of existence. Now the questions are of a decidedly more bottom-line sort: how will philosophy help you buy a house or build your pension pot? - Aeon
The aim is cognitive clarity via fewer inputs, distilled choices, and settings centred around presence and focus. While design minimalism emphasizes appearance and object count, psychological minimalism directs attention and reduces cognitive friction. - Psyche
A different dark vision of society has emerged. Suddenly, we seem to be living in the age of Epstein. We tell ourselves that by understanding his rise to power we might understand the world. - The New Yorker
The age of orality was an age of social storytelling and flexible cultural memory. The age of literacy made possible a set of abstract systems of thought—calculus, physics, advanced biology, quantum mechanics—that form the basis of all modern technology. - The Atlantic
I don’t believe in this inevitability. As a reader of many distinctive publications, I want to be led by them. What makes them special is where they choose to take me, and how much I trust them to do that. - The Atlantic
Mexistentialism “teaches us that our crises, even if they are framed by the catastrophic, are that only in appearance. … Our crises will not destroy us because these crises are inscribed in history, and it is history that frames who we are.” - Aeon
In Ireland, despite how often the government uses Irish arts to market the country to tourists, "more than 56 per cent of artists and arts workers experience enforced deprivation (that’s three times the rate in the general population).” - Irish Times (Archive Today)
It’s a design flaw, and it can be fixed. “We have been here before. Not just once, but repeatedly, in a pattern so consistent it reveals something essential about how cultural elites respond to changes in how knowledge moves through society.” - Aeon
Like many other words that have been “problematised” using post-structural approaches in the humanities, “care” is no longer simply a benign building block of a sentence, but is now part of a broader academic nexus that underpins its public expression. - The Critic
There are good reasons why people, at least at first, feel positive about their relationship with an AI companion. But new research is showing that these feelings change over time. Artificial empathy, it turns out, comes at a cost. - Psyche
The same teenager who supposedly lacks attention span can maintain game focus for hours while parsing a complex narrative across multiple storylines, coordinating with teammates, adapting strategy in real time. That’s not inferior cognition. It’s different cognition. And the difference isn’t the screen. It’s the environment. - Aeon
Literacy literally restructured our consciousness, and the demise of literate culture—the decline of reading and the rise of social media—is again transforming what it feels like to be a thinking, living person. - Derek Thompson
Despite years of Eat-the-Rich–type discourse, we seem to struggle with how money and power operate without falling into either conspiratorial exaggeration (the fantasy of Satan-worshipping elites ritualistically drinking baby blood is centuries old) or fawning admiration for the taste and sophistication of the rich and famous. - The American Scholar
When we speak of dignity, worth, or the respect owed to persons, we are not engaging in idle abstraction. These concepts do real work. They justify constraints on what the powerful may do to the vulnerable. - 3 Quarks Daily
