ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

IDEAS

The Humanities Crisis Is Over. Uh-Oh.

There is no longer a crisis in the humanities. Our field’s long-running narrative of continuous crisis is over. The bad news: The crisis of the humanities has been revealed by the events of the last year to be a crisis of civil society writ large. - Chronicle of Higher Education

The Poverty Of Living When Everything Is Ranked

Value capture occurs when you get your values from some external source and let them rule you without adapting them.” Because we live in a world in which nearly everything is quantified and ranked, value capture is everywhere. - The New Yorker

Making Climate Change Real: When We Write About Places People Know

We have discovered that writing about local places that people are already connected to changes this dynamic and gives people a way to examine their own assumptions within a recognisable framework. - The Conversation

Science Fiction And The Art Of Predicting The Future

At odds with the outspoken desire for that which is novel and original in art, audiences also have a hunger for the familiar or at least the spectacularly plausible. If the future can’t be predicted, then maybe it can be gamed out, run through a series of thought experiments. - The Baffler

The Mythology Of The Friend Group

If friend groups seem ubiquitous, so does a quiet underclass of people like me, bemoaning their lack of them. - The Atlantic

New Vision For Your Car: An AI Companion

Across the show floor, the car emerged less as a machine and more as a companion as automakers and tech companies showcased vehicles that can adapt to drivers and passengers in real time — from tracking heart rates and emotions to alerting if a baby or young child is accidentally left in the car. - Fast Company

We Need To Cultivate The Skill Of Critical Ignoring

In an age in which information on the internet is so abundant and so low-quality that it’s essentially noise, job number one is to fight our evolutionary instinct to absorb all available information, and instead filter out unreliable sources and bad data. - The Wall Street Journal

When Your Mind Goes Blank: What We’re Learning About Consciousness

Our consciousness roams, it can be focused on the here and now, or maybe the there and then, but it is always focused on something. Yet the experience of lulls in consciousness content challenges this assumption. - Psyche

Our Most Important Institutional Foundations Are Being Eroded: Truth And Trust

Truth and trust are often treated as virtues, but they function as conditions: the prerequisites for coherent societies, functional institutions, and stable international systems. Without them, even the most advanced technologies fail to deliver progress. - Time

Is This The Future Of Entertainment?

Domed screens, with comfortable seats and bar food, are actually the present for some (sports) fans. But the test run was “when the domed screen transformed into a high-resolution recreation of Michelangelo’s fresco paintings in the Sistine Chapel.” - The New York Times

A Famous French Philosopher Says Philosophy Can’t Help You Live Better

“Philosophy allows us to understand the world we live in. But I don’t think that it’s therapeutic, that it’s better to read Socrates than take Prozac. If you want to live better, fall in love, take Prozac or do whatever you want, but don’t turn to philosophy.” - El País English

How Espresso Fueled The Rise Of Modernity

“Milanese café owner Achille Gaggia cracked the code after WWII, with a small, steamless lever-driven machine that upped the pressure to produce the concentrated brew that is what we now think of as espresso.” - Open Culture

We’re Living Through The Last Days Of The Southern Drawl

Alert: The drawl wasn't actually that old. "For white speakers ... the peak southern accent was among ‘Baby Boomers born right after World War II.’ For Black speakers, the accent was strongest among Gen X, and began to disappear only among Millennials and Gen Z.” - The Atlantic

What Is John Mayer Planning To Do With Henson Studios?

Mayer and his business partner, filmmaker McG, have renamed it Chaplin Studios, and they’re not thinking small. “We’re doing our best to create kind of a Warhol’s Factory thing of like-minded artists bumping into each other to do their best work possible.” - Los Angeles Times (Yahoo)

Silicon Valley Is Pivoting To Audio And Away From Screens

The move reflects where the entire tech industry is headed — toward a future where screens become background noise and audio takes center stage. - TechCrunch

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