ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

IDEAS

Storytelling Goes Academic, Or Maybe Academia Gets Cool, With Podcasts

Daniel Heath Justice's "podcast, which will be peer-reviewed before its release—a first in North America—is part of a bold new take on research that treats new media as scholarship, defying the traditionally rigid informational hierarchies in academia." - MacLean's (Canada)

How Drug Trafficking Culture Came To Rule Style, Social Media, And Music

"The lives of buchonas, their flamboyant styles and their taste for plastic surgery are regularly chronicled in Spanish-language media outlets. Vloggers do roundups devoted to top buchonas. And internationally, people have adopted the style." Then there's the music. - Los Angeles Times

Princess Di Is Back In The Public Spotlight, But Why Now?

Not entirely clear, but "Diana’s posthumous framing as a rebel against the establishment with an undercurrent of feminine fragility resonates — even among those who weren’t old enough to witness her dancing to Uptown Girl ... the first time around." - Hyperallergic

A Social History Of Laughter

In the early years of the 18th century a select group of philosophers began to conceive of laughter as something that might police the boundaries of sociable conduct. - History Today

Globalization Has Been Widely Misunderstood. It’s Important To Be Clear About It

We are at a critical juncture: a relatively long period of stability in mainstream thinking about economic globalisation has given way to a situation of dramatic flux. - Aeon

Now AI Is Formulating Hypotheses Scientists Haven’t Thought Of

Creating hypotheses has long been a purely human domain. Now, though, scientists are beginning to ask machine learning to produce original insights. They are designing neural networks that suggest new hypotheses based on patterns the networks find in data. - Scientific American

Why Are AI Data Sets Disappearing From The Internet?

All together, about a dozen AI datasets vanished—hastily scrubbed by their creators after researchers, activists, and journalists exposed an array of problems with the data and the ways it was used, from privacy, to race and gender bias, to issues with human rights. - Slate

Mark Zuckerberg As Cultural Director Of The Internet? Er…

Though the term “metaverse” suggests a fully articulated sci-fi realm, Zuckerberg is using it to glamorize a network of virtual and augmented reality apps and gear, like headsets. - The New York Times

How To Memorize Something Complex? There’s A System For That

To earn the title of Grand Master of Memory, one must be able to memorize a 1000-digit number in one hour. The next hour you are faced with memorizing the order of ten packs of cards. And finally you get two minutes to memorize a single pack. - LitHub

How Do Hot Creative Streaks Happen?

Research found that artists and scientists tend to experiment with diverse styles or topics before their hot streak begins. This period of exploration is followed by a period of creatively productive focus. - The Atlantic

Before Time Began And We Were Free

The whole symbolic apparatus of cultural evolution aimed to make freedom—which they define as the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey orders, and the freedom to imagine less hierarchical ways of organizing ourselves—seem archaic and perilous. - The New Yorker

The Essential Philosophical Question: Have Philosophers Lost Their Way?

Today, few philosophers believe philosophy is a way of life, let alone the fullest and most complete way of life. Or if they do believe it, they won’t admit it in public. - 3 Quarks Daily

A Hard Truth? Democracies Aren’t Up To Big Challenges Like Climate Change

 The common theme in all these accounts is that the public are not to be trusted – they do not understand, or care; they are too selfish, or too shortsighted. Better to let the experts decide. - The Guardian

A Book That Promises To Challenge Everything We Think We Know About Human History

“There’s a whole new picture of the human past and human possibility that seems to be coming into view. And it really doesn’t resemble in the slightest these very entrenched stories going around and around.” - The New York Times

Why The Aspen Ideas Festival Is A Bad One (Idea, That Is)

If we’re to have ideas, let’s have fewer ideas, better ideas, and ideas more likely to annoy the sort of people who bankroll Ideas conferences. - The New Republic

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