ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

IDEAS

Humans Can Train To Be Alone With Our Thoughts

And we can even find it pleasurable - once the cravings for instant responses from our phones wear off. - Psyche

Technology Isn’t As Neutral As We Want It To Be

No tech is without cost, but "the digital revolution, instead of just ambivalence, seems instead to promise utopia but deliver harm." - Toronto Star

What Harvard Learned From The Pandemic

Those 17 months—marked by the pandemic, remote teaching, protests against systemic racism and police brutality, and economic hardship for millions of people—made it clear to educators that their students will enter a changed world after graduation. - Harvard Magazine

How Our Brains Prioritize Urgency Over Importance

The “mere urgency effect” describes our tendency to prioritize tasks we perceive as time-sensitive over tasks that aren’t time-sensitive, even when the rewards of the non-time-sensitive task are objectively greater. In other words, urgency trumps importance every time. - Fast Company

Science Why It’s Difficult To Enjoy Success

We know from research that purchasing an experience leads to more enduring happiness than purchasing a possession. But a study from Cornell found that this bias also applies to the anticipation of the upcoming purchase. - Fast Company

Studies Say Trigger Warnings May Be Harmful

The results of around a dozen psychological studies, published between 2018 and 2021, are remarkably consistent: trigger warnings do not seem to lessen negative reactions to disturbing material in students. Some studies suggest that the opposite may be true. - The New Yorker

Why You Shouldn’t Be Defined By Your Work

Just as our entertainment culture encourages us to self-objectify physically, our work culture pushes us to self-objectify professionally. - The Atlantic

How The Smithsonian Crowdsourced Weather Reports In The 1800s

The Institution handed out weather monitoring equipment to 150 volunteer observers across the country. Each day their reports arrived by telegraph, and the Smithsonian generated a national weather map displayed on the National Mall. The map became a popular attraction. - Smithsonian

Amazon Wants To Robotize Your Home. Do You Want It?

Science fiction is clearly a leaping-off point for Amazon's next wave of product ideas. Suri Maddhula, director of software for Amazon's Astro, even said as much: "It's taking science fiction and making it a reality." - CNet

Why Remote Work Is The Future

“A remote-first company can access the best talent in the world. An office-first company can only access those who live within a certain radius of their building.” - The New Yorker

Why We Need To Get Comfortable With Ambiguity

If freedom-minded people are to rid ourselves of “the habits of paranoia, despair, and policing” that Maggie Nelson believes to be menacing the left — from the MeToo movement to climate nihilism — we must learn to sit with ambiguity, risk, and indeterminacy. - New York Magazine

Facebook Isn’t A Platform, It’s A Country

Facebook is not merely a website, or a platform, or a publisher, or a social network, or an online directory, or a corporation, or a utility. It is all of these things. But Facebook is also, effectively, a hostile foreign power. - The Atlantic

Eric Schmidt: How Artificial Intelligence Will Interact With Us

We need to think now of what happens when artificial intelligence is co-resident with us in the world. It lives with us; it watches us; it helps us, maybe interferes with us occasionally. We don’t really know. - The Atlantic

Science as A Value-Free Enterprise

It is central to science, and its claims to objectivity, that values do not override facts. An important feature of this view of science is the distinction between epistemic and non-epistemic values. - 3 Quarks Daily

Ban Critical Arguments About America’s History? It’s A Familiar Tactic

We found the same arguments used by anti-radical activists as they sought for years to ban from public schools and universities Howard Zinn’s best-selling iconoclastic introduction to the American past. - The Nation

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