Survey participants placed the value of online reviews above price, free shipping, brand, and recommendations from family and friends. The survey found 94 percent of customers ranked it as the single most important factor, and four out of five said they won’t shop on a website unless it has customer reviews. - The Walrus
What is fiction in the first place? Despite common usage, philosophers agree that we can’t equate ‘fiction’ with ‘false content’. On the one hand, the inclusion of falsity isn’t enough to render a work fiction. - Aeon
Haven’t critics freaked out about the brain-scrambling power of everything from pianofortes to brightly colored posters? Isn’t there, in fact, a long section in Plato’s Phaedrus in which Socrates argues that writing will wreck people’s memories? - The New Yorker
Broadly, Project Liberty is part of the movement toward a decentralized social Internet, where no single network controls users’ data and users can instead move their online identities and communities from one network to another without having to start from scratch. - The New Yorker
In a lot of awards-discussion movies from 2024, "The directors are using the moments to explore complex power dynamics between characters. These scenes are meant to engender discussion, not arousal.” - The New York Times
Let’s stop complaining about the Oscars. “Awards season is an intrinsic part of the Los Angeles economy, and keeping the major events in place will do more to help those in need than a statement-making cancellation ever could.” - Vulture
Like every major platform in 2025, X has become more like TikTok, prioritizing recommended content from accounts from people users follow. You can still follow people on X, but its new influencer economy demands viral engagement, and viral engagement comes through the For You page and especially video. - Intelligencer (MSN)
For a large swath of the country, the idea of DEI has become a catchall insult. DEI is part bogeyman, part always-there scapegoat for some combination of bureaucracy, overreach, or mediocrity. - The Atlantic
Imagination of a sort is central to all experience. We construct our perceived world from incomplete information, interpreted via inner representations of our environment, that generate predictions of what is actually out there and how it will respond to our actions. - The Guardian
The unique conditions of the Village produced an environment in which genius could make sense of itself and wheat could be separated from chaff. The mid-century Village was a layered, organic, seething society: multiethnic, multigenerational, transclass, ideologically open and experimental. - First Things
My colleagues and I have been looking into what we call the ‘self-insight motive’ and we’ve found it might be more accurate to see it as akin to a personality trait that varies in strength between individuals – some people have more of it than other. - Psyche
Heaven knows there's a ton of social media videos purporting to show that the answer is yes. What do animal-cognition scientists think? - The New York Times Magazine
"In 1666, Louis XIV established the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris, which, unlike peer institutions in Italy or Britain, paid members a salary and covered their lodgings and equipment. … At court, (Louis XV and XVI) were routinely presented with the latest inventions or discoveries, sometimes even watching live demonstrations." - Artnet
Tussling with history and mythology, the film "goes all in on the idea that we still desperately need the old dyad of genius and modernist progress, that great minds, great thoughts, great works of human creativity can still transform us spiritually and materially.” - Washington Post
“What we have at present is a rather stark hierarchy of heritage. Buildings and artefacts are granted high levels of safeguarding. Yet culturally important landscapes, trees and rivers are left relatively undefended. Why the lack of equivalence?” - The Observer (UK)
