The modern U.S. economy is really made up of metropolitan regions, not states whose boundaries are arbitrary compared to local economies. A 2009 study identified eleven “megaregions” in the United States with 31 percent of all U.S. counties but 74 percent of the nation’s population. - Big Think
I don’t think culture is one thing. Sometimes it is a set of understandings and practices that we share with other people who have had the same kind of experiences, like a generation. - Public Books
It might just be inevitable to conclude that, as Shakespeare himself wrote, ‘there be nothing new, but that which is hath been before’ – borrowing from the Old Testament, of course. - Psyche
‘Good old-fashioned telepathy’ (GOFT) involves a direct transfer of thoughts from one mind to another. It has captivated people for a few reasons. - Aeon
For as long as technologies of writing and reading have been extending the mind, writers have offered strategies for managing that interaction and given advice for thinking properly in media environments that appeared hostile to ‘proper’ thought. - Aeon
Critics of these systems include artists, coders, legal experts, and even some of the engineers who build them. They argue that the systems that make this possible and art-generating AIs, all ingest content without securing permission from its creators. - The Wall Street Journal
In the months since its debut, ChatGPT has become a global phenomenon. Millions of people have used it to write poetry, build apps and conduct makeshift therapy sessions. And it has set off a feeding frenzy of investors trying to get in on the next wave of the A.I. boom. - The New York Times
"My favorites are the games that have intricate plots, because many of them are cultural markers that reveal what fascinates us — and more important, what scares us." - The Atlantic
Studies of grieving brains – be it scans of the brain regions which process grief, or measures of the stress hormone cortisol that is released in grief – show no differences in relation to race, age or religion. - The Conversation
We have surrendered ourselves to our entertainment. We will become so distracted and dazed by our fictions that we’ll lose our sense of what is real. We will make our escapes so comprehensive that we cannot free ourselves from them. The result will be a populace that forgets how to think... - The Atlantic
Considering the aspirations of so many people to return to it, you’d think the answer was a place, a spot in the world, with an address, much easier to locate than a time, though times have dates to identify them as precisely as street names and numbers identify places. - American Scholar
Sceptics were pretty happy about it. They thought of their scepticism as a way of life – as a way of reaching ataraxia or tranquillity. In their view, having beliefs is the ultimate cause of anxiety, and therefore the best way to avoid anxiety is to get rid of beliefs altogether. - Aeon
They were a cohort of historically unprecedented size, whose basic need to be clothed, fed, housed and educated was a decades-long jobs creator and economy stimulator. And they were a cohort whose massive size and timing meant cultural and economic dominance for much of their lives. - Washington Post
We might assume that our pandemic memories are missing because information entered our brains, then slipped from it—like a toy tumbling out of a clumsy toddler’s hands. However, it’s more likely that our brains weren’t storing that information in the first place. - The Walrus
