As people embrace these transformative tools, they risk eroding capacities and experiences that embody values other than seamlessness and efficiency. - The Atlantic
The Internet didn’t destroy monoculture. It exposed the fact that monoculture was always a bottleneck, popped the cork, and let the contents fizz out. - ARTnews
Or at least … that’s an idea? “Using the 17th-century nun Sor Juana as inspiration, lay out five steps to writing an assertive, non-people-pleasing email.” - NPR
The design team “gathered in a studio with a blacked-out stage, a giant glass version of the Apple TV logo, and a bevy of colorful studio lights.” - Fast Company (Archive Today)
OK, cool, especially if you’re a Roman Empire kind of person: “Users can digitally explore nearly 300,000 kilometers of roads laid across the vast Roman Empire at its height in the mid-second century.” - Open Culture
“If you have enough money to get somebody, anybody, to produce a white paper for you, which you can then put on some think-tank stationery? Then, my friend, you are ready to enter into the rushing current of elite reportage ... no matter how unhinged the position you’ve take.” - LitHub
In 2016, the group made its recommendation that the Anthropocene should be considered as the new epoch. This recommendation was later forwarded to higher ICS organs for consideration and voting. A series of votes was expected, but the proposal was rejected early on in the process in March 2024. - Aeon
As a wide range of social scientists, pollsters, and trendspotters have observed, a sense of fatalism has increasingly suffused the attitudes of many millennials and zoomers. - Drift Magazine
Roughly speaking, globalization flattens space and pares away cultural particularity; neoliberalism flattens value, reducing everything to its going rate on the market; the internet, and especially social media, flatten transactions and relationships into their barest, most instrumentalized form. - Commonweal
The central insight that these disparate thinkers took from Kant is that the world isn’t simply a thing, or a collection of things, given to us to perceive. Rather, our minds help create the reality we experience. - The New Yorker
Although many have outward-facing aspects, a hobby is ultimately a form of self-cultivation, pursued for reasons of personal satisfaction. Our society values publicity and productivity: perhaps that’s one reason that hobbies seem like they’re in decline. - The New Yorker
After the architects’ convention in 1900, public officials turned to specialists to address questions of aesthetic and space planning that had previously been matters of politics and patronage. Over the decade that followed, most public-building projects in D.C. came under a system of formal design review. - The Atlantic
AI’s automating powers are indiscriminate. They are affecting blue-collar manufacturing jobs and white-collar office jobs. Many who spent years, and thousands of dollars, developing specialized skills now need to live with the fact that AI can do their job faster and often better. It is a terrifying reality. - The Walrus
The more these systems anticipate and deliver what we want, the less we notice what’s missing—or remember that we ever had a choice in the first place. But remember: If you’re not choosing, someone else is. - The Atlantic
