Almost 95 percent of the experiments testing the happiness benefits of mindfulness, exercise, and engagement with nature, in particular, lacked big enough sample sizes to yield rigorous results. - Nautilus
Modern mental wellness tools, like mindfulness apps and cognitive behavioral therapy, vary in approach but share a self-help strategy centered on self-surveillance. But encouraging inward focus for calm and understanding can lead to hypervigilance or excessive self-analysis. Art, on the other hand... - Aeon
Meditating and other forms of mindfulness offer a metaphysical escapism that lets you pretend for a while that you are no more than an organism receiving inputs from your immediate surroundings, with no interpretative or meaning-making capabilities. - 3 Quarks Daily
"Uf you take anything from this, it’s that you should really go and see Barbie first. Because otherwise, and I’m talking from very recent first-hand experience, the effect is a little like having your mother’s funeral invaded by a flashmob of parking circus clowns." - The Guardian (UK)
"With Gerwig, there was always the sense that independent cinema meant a great deal to her, and so fans have felt disappointed. ... Gerwig worked hard, she paid her dues, she repeatedly tried to sell out, and she kept trying until she succeeded." - SIFF Blog
Not really. "The studios that now must figure out how to appease actors and writers are wildly different in size and have diverging priorities. They all say they want to resolve the strikes. But some are more willing than others to compromise." - The New York Times
"Netflix and all these other streaming services debuted in an environment where shareholders were encouraging them to spend money for growth. Interest rates were low. Borrowing money was cheap." That era is over, and the reckoning is here. - NPR
Turns out, the interventions do help. Reminders to think about accuracy, tips on digital literacy, and effective crowd-sourced accuracy ratings improve the information hygiene of people around the world. - Nautilus
The rise of “postcritique” signals a similar pivot in some English departments, while in the broader culture the aftermath of the Trump years has been marked by a steady retreat from feverish activist critique and a new hunger for style, humor and frivolity (TikTok, not Twitter; Red Scare, not Rachel Maddow). - The Point
"Their generation has come-of-age in a pandemic that killed millions of people and laid bare incredible systemic inequities. ... Many of my students don’t know how they will ever afford to pay off their student loans, much less buy a house." 9/11? So what? - LitHub
Maybe, but probably not. "It's worth putting some guardrails in place right at the start of your journey with these tools, or indeed deciding not to deal with them at all, based on how your data is collected and processed." - Wired
Fan fiction writers, "social media companies such as Reddit and Twitter, news organizations including The New York Times and NBC News, authors such as Paul Tremblay and the actress Sarah Silverman have all taken a position against A.I. sucking up their data without permission." - The New York Times
Over the past few months, I’ve become an A.I. limitationist. That is, I believe that while A.I. will be an amazing tool for, say, tutoring children all around the world, or summarizing meetings, it is no match for human intelligence. It doesn’t possess understanding, self-awareness, concepts, emotions, desires, a body or biology. - The New York Times
“A truly alien alien is so incomprehensible that stories about them just become stories about human beings,” Jaime Green writes in her new book, The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination, and Our Quest for Kinship in the Universe. - The New Republic
