Researchers are using AI to parse the “speech” of animals, enabling scientists to create systems that, for example, detect and monitor whale songs to alert nearby ships so they can avoid collisions. - The Wall Street Journal
"I wholeheartedly agree with something that the great historical sociologist Orlando Patterson said in a summer teacher seminar: If you want to critique western culture, you must own the culture and know it from the inside." - Inside Higher Ed
Matt Belloni: "The leading minds at media companies (and the consulting firms that nudge them) have convinced the C-suite trigger-pullers that if you spend enough money streaming ... the riches of global scale and pricing power await." Why? "It’s true, because everyone says it’s true." - Puck News
Ideas and ways of shopping "fall by the wayside and then return at a later date in new guises or with new names. They often have every appearance of being newly invented. Take fast fashion, for instance" - and its origins in 18th century London. - Fast Company
Digitalization has affected both the demand and supply for cultural content. Increasingly sophisticated technology and adoption of digital devices to experience things remote because of the pandemic have developed a taste for new ways to “tour” museums, “attend” theatre and participate in book readings. - The Conversation
Peter Turchin has been warning for a decade that a few key social and political trends portend an “age of discord,” civil unrest and carnage worse than most Americans have experienced. - The Atlantic
There are a range of moral questions surrounding how we should respond to the immoral acts of artists whose work we love. But, for art lovers, a central aspect of revelations about artists’ behaviour is how it makes us feel. - Psyche
While employers rethink office buildings on the micro scale, cities and regions need to grapple with how to efficiently use their office-dominated downtowns, which are their most central and easy-to-access places. - The Atlantic
Looking outside your industry for strategy improvements and breakthroughs is a good approach. The core reason why it doesn’t work more often is inertia. - Harvard Business Review
"The show’s fake commercial for Amazon Go illustrated the disparity that white and Black consumers might experience in a store promoting freedom but mired by surveillance." - The Atlantic
"Contemporary Americans are relatively inexperienced with infectious disease compared with our ancestors; in search of explanations, many have reached for what seems closest at hand in popular culture and popular history, where the plague has always loomed large." - Slate
After Area 405's building was put on the market in a time of rapidly rising property values or what some might call gentrification (a brewery just opened around the corner), a massive campaign and fundraising effort meant the artists got to kept their space. - Baltimore Sun
Colombia's culture minister: “What, for me, would be the greatest win or success for Encanto — aside from the three award nominations in the Oscars — is how the world now sees Colombia. ... We’re no longer seen just as the country of drug lords." - The New York Times
The larger problem with worshipping work is that it sucks up employees’ interest and energy in any kind of civic engagement in neighborhoods, cities, local and national politics. “Techtopia,” she writes, “is corroding the collective capacity to build and sustain the common good.” - Religion News
