So, stop worrying about whether your attention span is too short, and start understanding distractedness as "a radical alternative to an internalised puritan work ethic." - The Guardian (UK)
A five-year full-on "test" to figure out which theory is right didn't figure it out - but that doesn't mean we didn't learn anything about our brains. - Wired
"Spotify laid off hundreds and effectively killed its in-house podcast production units, Gimlet and Parcast. It seemed like every entity, from public radio to news publishers, made cuts to their podcast units. Companies folded, and left their creators hanging." - The Verge
In 1956, Australia held an international competition "to design a national performance venue on Bennelong Point that would put Sydney on the map" - an idea that certainly worked. - BBC
Jennifer Richeson analyzed questionnaires completed by 400 One Small Step participants before and after their conversations. Her analysis showed that both liberals and conservatives felt more empathetic towards their partners following their conversations. - Current
The culture wars that take place over controversial moral questions are, in part, battles over which ethically loaded concepts should win out within a society. - Aeon
We’re in a spiritual revolution. Access to astrology and other spiritual practices has proliferated across witchy corners of the internet, with many tools fully embracing artificial intelligence as part of the supernatural process. - Wired
Legal experts told me that copyright challenges pose a near-existential threat to existing A.I. models if the way they’re being trained isn’t aboveboard. If they can’t ingest mountains of data—which until now they’ve largely done without paying for that data—they won’t work. - Slate
The internet is worth fighting for because despite all the misery, there’s still so much good to be found there. And yet, fixing online discourse is the definition of a hard problem. But look. Don’t worry. I have an idea. - MIT Technology Review
Maybe the nightmare about AI isn’t that it will go rogue and threaten our existence with lethal viruses. Maybe the likely endgame is similar to the enchanted broom—more mundane but no less messy: humanity flooded with bullshit. - The Walrus
It’s the age-old problem of the relationship between the good and the popular. Plato saw the popular as the enemy of the good, but then he is at one end of the scale, famously arguing that democracy was bad because it confused the good with the popular. - 3 Quarks Daily
“We’re the first to see our downtown as impacted as it is, because when we said ‘Work from home,’ everyone just grabbed a laptop, and boom!” That reliance on tech made downtown especially vulnerable. - The New Yorker
Bound together as parasite/host, neither people nor technologies can exist apart from the other because they are constitutive prostheses of each other. Such an interrelation is not unique to human beings. - Noema
Our hardwired love for "cute" may cause a few issues as "new robotic or artificial personas use cuteness to solicit our affection." - The Guardian (UK)
