Hillary Clinton: An “epidemic of loneliness” may sound abstract at a time when our democracy faces concrete and imminent threats, but the surgeon general’s report helps explain how we became so vulnerable. - The Atlantic
"It’s not hard to understand why nostalgia is everywhere. ... It feels as though the world is spiralling towards fascism in the midst of an accelerating environmental apocalypse, and a yearning for a lost past that seems safer and better than our present is an understandable reaction." - The Guardian (UK)
"No clear economic reason for art criticism that is not glorified public relations to exist, so it barely does. While art is an extreme case in this regard, it’s also a leading indicator: as defender and judge of quality, the critic is an endangered species in many industries these days." - The Point
Look at any social media post that has more than a dozen responses; inevitably, one of them will attack the original post on the basis of some perceived moral transgression. - The Walrus
I understand the need to present scientific findings in a clean, concise way, but the papers also omit all the false starts, blind alleys, broken equipment, and dumb mistakes that beset real scientific research every day. By omitting all the human stuff, the papers fail to explain how science really gets done. - The American Scholar
Too much focus on this worry risks downplaying somewhat less apocalyptic but more likely scenarios of social disruption, like dramatic upheavals in jobs. Finally, hype and alarmism about AI will inevitably be used to advance stupid, self-interested, or beside-the-point pet causes. - New Atlantis
There’s a lot of talk of “innovation” in Silicon Valley, a term that usually means destroying things that work in favor of things that don’t. What these systems produce is statistically “near” the stuff we say, or the things we tell them to do, or the images we feed them. - The Daily Beast
Seems unlikely. "More films that skew to female audiences? The success of Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey already told them that. don’t expect a rush of films about quantum mechanics. Do expect Barbie’s success to accelerate the habit of making films about toys." - Irish Times
"The beauty of going to the movies was never just about the films on the screens — it was about the way we all gathered to watch them." - The New York Times
And it's earning a lot of money at the box office. For instance, "Greta Gerwig used techniques dating back to silent film and soundstage musicals to bring her fantastical, hot-pink vision of Barbieland to life." - The Guardian (UK)
The reasons can vary, but from fig leaves on sculptures to TV versions of classic films, when a work of art has a wider and more varied audience, censors work to cover, replace, or reshape the originals to make it more publicly palatable. - Christian Science Monitor
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
