As AI proliferates, this lack of originality in our daily language is what will render so many of our jobs irrelevant... It’s clear that one of our best defenses against the rise of the writing machines might be to learn how to think like a poet. - Washington Post
The director of Ghost Dog and Coffee and Cigarettes says that "funnelling creative energy into making music has become a vital escape from some of the stresses and hurdles involved in getting films funded and made." - The Guardian (UK)
I not only worry that "cli-fi" might not be an effective form of environmental expression – I have come to believe that the genre might be actively dangerous, stunting our cultural ability to imagine a future worth living in or fighting for. - BBC
"A host of researchers (is) probing subtle differences in white matter to better understand ... its role in making us who we are — including how much white matter dictates variations between people's everyday behavior, and whether it's implicated in how some patients recover better than others from life-threatening brain injuries." - Nautilus
Human bodies are basically built to see and move forward; human brains tend to conceive of time in that forward way. Octopuses can move in any direction and see almost 360 degrees. They also, unlike most humans, die quickly after reproducing. Can cephalopods offer us a new model of conceiving time? - Aeon
Thinking for yourself has never been easy, but the question of whether it is still possible at all is of some moment. The key ideals of liberal democracy—moral independence and intellectual autonomy—depend on it. - The Walrus
Free thinkers and sceptics, they imagine themselves as emancipated from imprisoning beliefs. Yet most of what they, and you, know comes not from direct experience or through figuring it out for oneself, but from unknown others. - 3 Quarks Daily
Do you study creativity by analyzing people commonly acknowledged to be creative and figure out what they all have in common? Or could someone who has never actually created anything be creative, in the way that innately intelligent people can end up in unskilled jobs? - The New Yorker
Barely more than a decade later, the internet is not the tool. I am the tool. Somehow, I have been instrumentalized by the internet, which operates me through my phone. It often feels like the internet is reading my mind. - Slate
Who picks up the tab of paying for journalism when the audience won’t, and how does that change the truths that we journalists want to tell? - The Point
How do we weigh an artist’s accomplishment against his personal wickedness? “Do we believe genius gets special dispensation, a behavioral hall pass?” Should we draw clear distinctions between a transgressive work of art and behavioral transgressions? - The Atlantic
"I desperately want everyone to witness the euphoric tactical flourishes and wonderful social interactions that a great board game can foster in the right environment, but I have also come to understand that for some people, a pile of cardboard will always be a pile of cardboard." - Slate
Let's rethink the whole thing. "Seeing a work of art as indissolubly linked with an individual creator’s technical skills is a worn-out myth. The further we develop, the more this link displays its conventionality." - Los Angeles Review of Books
“A lot of us wanted to believe that we had free and open discussions in this country, and that we can talk about anything, and that we can make changes. It sounds great as cocktail-party chitchat, when we are all in the room with the same beliefs.” - Christian Science Monitor
