IDEAS

Grappling With What A Soul Is

This soul of yours has obviously come into existence with your body. Yet equally obviously it’s not made of bodily stuff. It lasts through the night when your body sleeps. It wanders off and leaves your body when you dream. - Aeon

Rethinking How Our Brains Process The World Using Categories

“The stimulus, cognition, response model of the brain is wrong. The brain prepares for a response and then perceives a stimulus. A brain is not reactive. It’s predictive. Action planning comes first. Perception comes second, as a function of the action plan.” - Picower Institute

Uncertainty Can Be Toxic. But Understanding it Creates Possibility

Research suggests uncertainty can be more distressing than negative certainty. In one study, people were calmer when they knew they would receive an electric shock than when there was only a 50% chance of one. - The Guardian

How AI Will Accelerate Human Creativity

The most successful organizations of 2026 and beyond will not be those that simply use AI to do more things faster. Instead, they will be the ones that use AI as a creativity accelerator, freeing up human capacity for the work that only we can do: imagining, connecting, and creating meaning. - Fast Company

The Board That Built Apple – And A Personal Computing Revolution – Is Turning Fifty

“The Apple I marked a great leap forward in convenience by coming already assembled, albeit without a monitor, a keyboard, or even a case; the purchase price of USD $666.66 (closer to $4,000 today) just got you the board. But what a board.” - Open Culture

What It Means That Hampshire College’s ‘Experimental’ Liberal Arts Education Is Saying Goodbye

“The shuttering of Hampshire College … feels different, not so much another liberal arts domino falling as the symbolic end of a whole tradition of progressive education in the US.” - New York Review Of Books

This Absolutely Unhinged Theme Park Presaged The Rise Of Silicon Valley

"From elephants to enterprise software — is there a better metaphor for the last half-century of radical change in San Mateo County? But mostly we should mark this anniversary so we don’t forget perhaps the most bonkers destination in Bay Area history.” - San Francisco Chronicle

One Restaurant Decided To Replace Its Workers With QR Codes, And Then It Found Out What That Would Mean

Oops. The Walker Art Center is not happy: "Cardamom is slated to shutter within the next 60 to 90 days. The museum is now seeking proposals for a replacement restaurant.” - ArtNews

The V&A East Is Just One Example Of How England, And The Entire UK, Could Put Money Back Into The Arts

Make the United Kingdom truly good again - with culture. - The Guardian (UK)

The Film About France During WWII That Is Very, Alarmingly Relevant To Several Other Countries Right Now

Yes, you need to watch The Sorrow and the Pity, and you need to do it right now. Why? Because “Ophuls’s film is illuminating precisely because its lessons about complicity apply to evil and corruption of all kinds.” - The Atlantic

Study: The Antidote To Mindless Phone Rot — A Surprising Finding

The results after doing so were eye-opening even to them: among a totally random population, levels of creativity for the people watching the experimental films were immediately higher compared to those watching YouTube videos, which didn’t move much at all. So was openness to seeing the world in new ways. - The Hollywood Reporter

AI’s Are Beginning To Get Emotional Intelligence

Emotions are the AI industry’s new fixation. Not only are growing numbers of start-ups such as Amotions AI promising tools that interpret feelings; the major AI companies are developing chatbots that apparently aren’t just smarter—they get you. - The Atlantic

The Pressure To Go Viral: These Days You Can’t Be An Artist Without It

All of a sudden, chefs, lawyers, podcasters, critics – all people with jobs once associated with an off-camera existence – are turning the lens on themselves. Even film director Werner Herzog, a once proud non-social media user, is now sizzling steaks and doing unboxing videos to camera. - The Guardian

How AI Will Kill Content Platforms

Not only will AI agents compete away the revenue streams of the giant digital platforms, but they will also render irrelevant the data on which the platforms built their competitive advantage. - Harvard Business Review

Why Has Culture Gone Flat?

Capitalism—and then late capitalism, and then late, late capitalism—has been identified as the culprit for culture’s flattening for at least a century. David Marx borrows heavily from Fredric Jameson’s account of postmodernism. - LA Review of Books

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