ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

IDEAS

Decades Of Misguided Literacy Instruction Are Finally Ending

But the U.S. remains mired in distrust of public schools, not to mention reading culture. - Slate

Living At The End Of Time

"This is in fact the end of time, and you have to be a tech bro or a fascist, or both, to think that we are not at a precipice of cataclysmic loss. The question then becomes why write and publish, or do anything." - LitHub

New Technologies Usually Arrive In Clusters. So What’s Coming With AI?

The potential — and hype — surrounding machine learning, artificial intelligence, and especially generative AI is everywhere. Some are predicting a full suite of “this changes everything” advances in all industries, for all professions, and for people in their public and private lives. - Harvard Business Review

This City In Arizona Is Carless. It Changes The Way People Live

“It is amazing how much the urbanism improves, both in terms of experience and efficiency, when you don’t need to store automobiles.” - The Guardian

Where Our Brains Save Different Kinds Of Memories

"Each time an experience is recalled, there are changes in the connection weights of the network, causing memory elements to get more averaged out. It raises questions about the circumstances under which “eyewitness testimony be protected from bias and influence from repeated onslaughts of queries." - Nautilus

Why So Many People Feel They’re Stuck In BS Jobs

Simon Walo estimated that 19 per cent of people in the United States believe their jobs are ‘bullshit’ and, for the most part, working in one of Graeber’s BS occupations significantly increased the probability that a person perceived their job as socially useless, compared with being in another kind of job. - Psyche

Is The Internet Less Fun Now?

The social-media Web as we knew it, a place where we consumed the posts of our fellow-humans and posted in return, appears to be over. The precipitous decline of X is the bellwether for a new era of the Internet that simply feels less fun than it used to be. - The New Yorker

Has The Internet Been Abandoned To Bots?

Under your nose, the Internet of real people has gradually shifted into a digital world of shadow puppets. They look like people, they act like people, but there are no people left. Well, there’s you and maybe a few others, but you can’t tell the difference, because the bots wear a million masks. - New Atlantis

Has Progress In Our Culture Come To A Standstill?

"Today culture remains capable of endless production, but it’s far less capable of change. Intellectual property has swallowed the cinema; the Hollywood studios that once proposed a slate of big, medium and small pictures have hedged their bets, and even independent directors have stuck with narrative and visual techniques born in the 1960s." - The New York Times

Gen Z Can’t Read Cursive

Thus, an iconic outdoor brand had to change its 60-year-old logo. - Fast Company

Films Are So Much More Than Their Plots

A movie's story is not always - nor even often - the thing. - The New York Times

We’re Inside The Orwellian Nightmare

Social media's rewards for rage and hate are immediate, and terrifying. - The Guardian (UK)

The ‘Dangerous’ Movie For Couples

Not Barbie, though the summer was filled with tales of women leaving their boyfriends after suddenly understanding the patriarchy. Fair Play is an autumn break-up movie. - The New York Times

Researchers Want To Declare Leading Theory Of Consciousness “Pseudoscience”

Earlier this month, the consciousness science community erupted into chaos. An open letter, signed by 124 researchers—some specializing in consciousness and others not—made the provocative claim that one of the most widely discussed theories in the field, Integrated Information Theory (IIT), should be considered “pseudoscience.” - Nautilus

The Right People Aren’t In The Room Talking About AI

AI absolutely is powerful, and it absolutely is dangerous. But as these perspectives reverberate throughout committee hearings, government advisory boards, press releases, and lobbying memos, it only becomes clearer that focusing on just a subset of influential corporate voices is an inherently limited approach. - The Atlantic

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