ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

IDEAS

Is There Any Way To Win The Fight Against Disinformation?

Yes, but it won't be top-down. "Factchecking outfits may do good work, but they are missing a crucial component: the power of the crowd. Because, as well as counterfactual communities, we’ve also seen what you might call truth-seeking communities emerge around specific issues." - The Guardian (UK)

Has The Internet Ruined April Fool’s Day?

Or, more likely, has April Fool's Day ruined the internet? "People, us included, get so easily hoodwinked, and ... this has led us to a place where we start to suspect that nothing online is real." - Slate

Turns Out The SAT Might Not Be The Problem In College Admissions

The test is still a problem, but not having it as a factor in admissions only harmed lower-income students in college admissions. How? "The SAT doesn’t create inequalities in these academic skills. It reveals them." - The Atlantic

Are You Stuck In “Goblin Mode”?

“Goblin mode” is taking the current pandemic-ridden world by storm. This state of being is defined by behaviours that feel reminiscent of deep lockdown days – never getting out of bed, never changing into real clothes, grazing from tins or packets instead of cooking... - The Conversation

Scientist Proposes That Information Might Be The “Fifth State Of Matter”

The mass-energy-information equivalence principle Melvin Vopson proposed in his 2019 AIP Advances paper assumes that a digital information bit—used for digital data storage today—is not just physical, but has a “finite and quantifiable mass while it stores information.” - Popular Mechanics

What Does It Mean To Be Authentic? Scientists Are Studying It, Of Course

We propose that authenticity is a feeling that people interpret as a sign that what they are doing in the moment aligns with their true self. - The Conversation

What Did Jefferson’s Call To “The Pursuit Of Happiness” Really Mean?

Jefferson’s Enlightenment contemporaries fully understood. They accepted happiness as our greatest good. But only in theory. And theory, as they were often quick to insist, was not practice. - The American Scholar

Towards A New Definition Of Scholarship

“We believe the time has come to move beyond the tired old ‘teaching versus research’ debate and give the familiar and honorable term ‘scholarship’ a broader more capacious meaning, one that brings legitimacy to the full range of academic work.” - 3 Quarks Daily

The Difficulty Of Telling History

There is no one past. There are countless pasts. Mine. Yours. The billions, or at least millions, of people who were alive at any given moment. The great, great majority of them never meeting or even knowing of each other, having no discernible influence on each other. - 3 Quarks Daily

The Internet As An Idea (That We’re Trapped In)

The crisis really heats up when the algorithm’s structuring power bends back upon us and constrains us into thinking of ourselves as if we were algorithmic systems. - Los Angeles Review of Books

Why Do We Still Need Religion?

Part of the reason people are attracted to religion is that its rituals – the standing, sitting and kneeling in unison, the singing, the listening to emotionally rousing sermons – trigger the brain’s endorphin system. - The Guardian

The Quantifiable, Scientific Measure Of Art

Art historians may say that they do not need numbers. There is the art: you just need to look, think, and write. But that is to misunderstand the nature of knowledge. All empirical claims are probabilistic, and the only issue is how to make them. Scientists estimate the truth: everyone else just guesses. - Inference

What Happens When Students Learn History Through Video Games

Academic historians must now grapple with a new breed of students “for whom Paradox is the historical mother tongue and actual history is only a second language.” - The Atlantic

What’s The Deal With The Mid-Century Modern Obsession?

"In a noisy, high-tech society, it’s no wonder they’re all the craze, but it appears mid-century modernism’s cultish popularity has all but blinded us to the basic needs it was initially meant to address." - The Atlantic

How CODA Came From Way Behind To Win The Oscars

Timing (and a relentless campaign): "After the bombast of awards season, it seemed fresh and fulfilling: a movie that told its story with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of heart. A movie that wanted only to move you." - Slate

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