ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

IDEAS

How The Pandemic Has Changed Cities (Perhaps For Good)

Even with those opinions on the books, the pandemic—or really, the haphazard response to it—has shifted people’s perceptions of what a city can be. - Wired

Ways To Think About Death (It Might Not Be So Bad?)

This is not an argument that death is not bad. This is the titular argument that death is probably not as bad as you think it is. - 3 Quarks Daily

Let’s Look At The Toxic Damage Of Bullshit

The mass production of warm sounding words with minimal interest in real material outcomes is signifying bullshit (SB). It is nearly ubiquitous. - 3 Quarks Daily

While Paris Wants To Be A “Fifteen-Minute City,” Sweden Experiments With A “One-Minute City”

While Paris works with a 15-minute radius and Barcelona’s superblocks with nine-block chunks of the city, Sweden’s project operates at the single street level, paying attention to “the space outside your front door — and that of your neighbors adjacent and opposite.” - Bloomberg

Meditating On The Art Of Giving Up

The way the idea of giving up figures in our lives, as a perpetual lure and an insistent fear. The giving up that involves leaving ourselves out of what we had wanted, or thought we had wanted. The giving up that is linked to a sense of impossibility, or of possibilities running out. - London Review of Books

How Disgust Drives Behavior

Once you are attuned to disgust, it is everywhere. On your morning commute, you may observe a tragic smear of roadkill on the highway or shudder at the sight of a rat browsing garbage on the subway tracks.  - The New York Times

Amazon As A Grand Narrative

“The relation of Amazon to fiction, to story, is more than one of convenience, going to the core of its corporate identity,” Mark McGurl writes: “the company sees itself in terms of an unfolding epic narrative of astounding achievement it can’t find enough ways to narrate.” n+1

Does Art Really Have Role When Times Are Bad?

To Thomas Mann, the ironist was always serious in play. But does playing seriously mean playing unapologetically, letting oneself be nothing but a player? Or does it mean taking play seriously, as an activity with its own conditions of possibility, among which are both an appreciative audience and a certain pathos of distance?  - The Point

Is The Golden Age Of Travel Over?

The old way it was practised, at vast scale, and across increasingly porous borders, has begun to look like it might be a terminal casualty. At the time of writing, there are only memories, and the work of reorienting ourselves to a more inert and less hospitable world. - Aeon

Can Machines Measure Common Sense?

Consciousness, thought, creativity, will, imagination, and agency — once considered to be explainable only through philosophical reflection were now reformulated as precisely defined cognitive functions. And these functions could in turn be measured and compared between humans and machines. - The New Atlantis

Intelligence, Machines, And Why It’s Increasingly Difficult To Tell The Difference

Any of us have interacted with apparently thoughtful machines often enough—for instance, when on the telephone and trying, often fruitlessly, to get to a customer service representative, that we have gradually lowered our standards for intelligence. - Hedgehog Review

Researchers: Where Your Sense Of Right And Wrong Comes From

The researchers found that higher conscientiousness – the tendency to be organised, hardworking and disciplined – was related to rating loyalty, authority and purity/sanctity as important bases for morality. - Psyche

The Essence Of Who You Are

The essence of selfhood is neither a rational mind nor an immaterial soul. It is a deeply embodied biological process, a process that underpins the simple feeling of being alive that is the basis for all our experiences of selfhood. - Nautilus

My Life As A Cyborg

My elevator pitch goes something like this: “I know you think cyborgs are always imminent. But not here yet. However, I am a cyborg. And cyborgs are first and foremost disabled people. We’re the ones who have a fundamental interface with tech. - Wired

What’s The Point Of Coming In To An Office?

The offices of tomorrow may have more in common with a café or a classroom or a maker space, IDEO's Sandy Speicher says. It’s all about giving people a “reason to come in rather than regulation to come in.” - Harvard Business Review

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