ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

IDEAS

Why You Shouldn’t Be Defined By Your Work

Just as our entertainment culture encourages us to self-objectify physically, our work culture pushes us to self-objectify professionally. - The Atlantic

How The Smithsonian Crowdsourced Weather Reports In The 1800s

The Institution handed out weather monitoring equipment to 150 volunteer observers across the country. Each day their reports arrived by telegraph, and the Smithsonian generated a national weather map displayed on the National Mall. The map became a popular attraction. - Smithsonian

Amazon Wants To Robotize Your Home. Do You Want It?

Science fiction is clearly a leaping-off point for Amazon's next wave of product ideas. Suri Maddhula, director of software for Amazon's Astro, even said as much: "It's taking science fiction and making it a reality." - CNet

Why Remote Work Is The Future

“A remote-first company can access the best talent in the world. An office-first company can only access those who live within a certain radius of their building.” - The New Yorker

Why We Need To Get Comfortable With Ambiguity

If freedom-minded people are to rid ourselves of “the habits of paranoia, despair, and policing” that Maggie Nelson believes to be menacing the left — from the MeToo movement to climate nihilism — we must learn to sit with ambiguity, risk, and indeterminacy. - New York Magazine

Facebook Isn’t A Platform, It’s A Country

Facebook is not merely a website, or a platform, or a publisher, or a social network, or an online directory, or a corporation, or a utility. It is all of these things. But Facebook is also, effectively, a hostile foreign power. - The Atlantic

Eric Schmidt: How Artificial Intelligence Will Interact With Us

We need to think now of what happens when artificial intelligence is co-resident with us in the world. It lives with us; it watches us; it helps us, maybe interferes with us occasionally. We don’t really know. - The Atlantic

Science as A Value-Free Enterprise

It is central to science, and its claims to objectivity, that values do not override facts. An important feature of this view of science is the distinction between epistemic and non-epistemic values. - 3 Quarks Daily

Ban Critical Arguments About America’s History? It’s A Familiar Tactic

We found the same arguments used by anti-radical activists as they sought for years to ban from public schools and universities Howard Zinn’s best-selling iconoclastic introduction to the American past. - The Nation

How Digitization Is Changing The Essence Of Collecting Culture

The collector is the only one who decides how to arrange her possessions, ordering books by author, title, theme, or even (unfortunately) color of the cover — and they stay in the same places they’re put. That’s not true of our digital cultural interfaces. - Kyle Chayka

The Queer, Indigenous Creatives Behind Reservation Dogs

Screenwriter Tommy Pico on what that adds to the show: "Humor is a tool — a marker of resilience, a willingness to heal and to be productive in that. It can be a way to take the air out of a situation, to make certain things more digestible. It’s also medicine." - them

In The Musical-To-Movie Pipeline, Is The Strong Dislike For ‘Dear Evan Hansen’ Fair?

"How did a beloved Broadway musical — winner of six Tony Awards, including best musical — provoke one of the most widespread and united hate-ons since Cats? How did a movie marketed as a feel good, come-together story get branded 'manipulative' so many times it's nearly become a tagline?" Ouch. - CBC

A Revolution In How/Why We Work

The moral structure of work is up for grabs. And with labor-friendly economic conditions, workers have little to lose by making creative demands on employers. We now have space to reimagine how work fits into a good life. - The New York Times

Newly Discovered Fossil Footprints Suggest Humans Were in North America 21,000 Years Ago

Until now, scientists believed humans travelled south into the Americas when this ice barrier began to melt –  16,500 years ago. But we have discovered  fossil footprints that suggest humans first set foot on the continent thousands of years earlier. - The Conversation

Honest Brokers And The Clement Greenberg Problem

Greenberg had made it clear that the single most lucrative move for a modern-day critic was to announce the newest new thing, the coming revolution that would sweep everything else aside. And he had proven so influential that... - Ted Gioia

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