"My first conversation with captioned glasses did feel like something out of the movies. I kept shaking my head in wonder at the captions floating in the air before me. 'This is so cool,' I kept saying." - The Atlantic
Maureen Down isn't having it. "Without humanities, humanity and humaneness, we won’t be imbuing society with wisdom, just creating owner’s manuals. That would be a floccinaucinihilipilification." - The New York Times
Where do real memories end and generative AI begin? It’s a question for the AI era, where our holy photos merge with holey memories, where new pixels are generated whole cloth by artificial intelligence. - Wired
If a secret really is something I tell only myself, is there something here that is mine and mine alone, that survives as my true ‘self’, more basic than the many roles I play out socially? - Aeon
Reporting for this story, I spoke with multiple people who are essentially funemployed, or at least one meaning of it, who sit around at work all day with very little to do. What was most surprising was that many did not exactly love the situation and felt somewhat conflicted. - Vox
Numerous studies have shown that, due to a myriad of cognitive biases such as belief perseverance and confirmation bias, facts unfortunately do not change people’s minds. Propaganda, on the other hand, works very well on this front, something we see clearly from how people and groups have used it over the past century. - Psyche
New scholarship indicates that the end of the Cold War did not so much settle history’s debates as it did undermine the structuring framework of American politics. - Public Books
After a century or so, as Dave Hickey explains, in which it had evaded institutional control—a century of Parisian bohemians, modernist vagabonds, and visionary wackjobs, of Rimbaud, van Gogh, Nijinsky, Cage, Gertrude Stein, et al.—art was being standardized and, more importantly, moralized. The audience, in other words, was being normed as well. - Tablet
The essays in “On Women” make clear that, for Sontag, the oppression of women presented an aesthetic and narrative problem as well as a political and economic one. - The New Yorker
How would we deal with artificial beings with rich capacities for thought, experience, and feeling? What are our obligations to them? What of their freedom and dignity? - 3 Quarks Daily
OK, and this is possibly unexpected, "Coloring within the lines — of an intricate pattern, for example — appears to be especially effective" at dealing with anxiety. - The New York Times
What? "If its full storage capacity was purposed for music, a modern iPhone or Samsung Galaxy could hold hundreds of thousands of downloaded songs, representing more than 1 million minutes of audio. And yet those same phones will sometimes whine that your voicemail is full." - The Atlantic
But it's all about persistence, not fairy dust: "The serial-order effect applies to tasks that last minutes or days, but creativity also improves across years, decades, and even careers." - The Atlantic
