The character sketch is a genre that is descriptive by nature, and that today reads as a little sociological, a little literary, and more than a little comic. While a part of our everyday discourse, this genre has a long history, stretching all the way back to ancient Greece. - Aeon
In another generation, intellectual historians like Dabhoiwala will look back to the present and ask themselves how it happened that, early in the 21st century, such a sizeable swath of the Anglophone intelligentsia turned against one of its own best, and most ennobling, traditions. - The Point
Call the genre the AI-and-I essay. Between April and July, the New Yorker published more than a dozen such pieces: essays about generative AI and the dangers it poses to literacy, education, and human cognition. Each had a searching, plaintive web headline. - n+1
In some recovery programs, “one day at a time” is a mantra. This is a little like what E. L. Doctorow said about being a novelist: Writing a novel “is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” - The New Yorker
The quality of stupidity is just, sort of, there; and there’s lots of it. Could you write a history of happiness, or bad luck, or knees? - The Guardian
We tend to think that we perceive reality as it is, with cameralike eyes that objectively log the light that hits them. But as information from the eyes flows into the brain, it becomes more abstract and subjective. - Scientific American
“In recent years, Americans have drifted away from many of their once-beloved sources of pleasure: drinking, throwing parties, having sex, making friends. Yet they keep coming back to theme parks.” - The Atlantic
Hopwood DePree "grew up listening to stories of the family’s ancestral home in England, but believed them to be fairytales, until he began researching his family tree online, and discovered his Manchester roots.” - The Guardian (UK)
“Paris, the centre of French gastronomy, has never been in more need of a great restaurant critic. Today, the Parisian food media scene has become a never-ending circle of new restaurants hyped for a couple of weeks before the next ones come in.” - Vittles
The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, also known as the frequency illusion, is a type of cognitive bias where, once you learn about something – such as a word, person or concept – you start to notice it more frequently. - Psyche
While the two of us disagree on whether there are any valid uses of AI in the research process, using AI to “improve” one’s writing or “read” one’s readings fundamentally misunderstands what a humanities education is about. - Harvard Crimson
Thanks to the image obtained, the researchers were able to confirm an already theorized architecture of thought: that there is no single region exclusively in charge of decision-making and instead it is a coordinated process among multiple brain areas. - Wired
What digital platforms take away is more than just our attention being “continuously partial” — they also limit the deeper kind of reflection that allows us to engage with life and ourselves fully. They make us lose the capacity to inhabit silence and confront the unfilled moment. - The Conversation
It is rooted in the widespread perception that they have become ideological monoliths, barely tolerating the expression of any conservative opinions on campus. It has to do with the rapidly growing endowments of the largest universities, which now command a degree of tax-exempt wealth that seems to many people out of all proportion. - Persuasion
