The two hundred and fifty members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters are writers, composers, visual artists, and architects. It is a fixed number. When a member dies, potential new members are nominated and voted on. - Harper's
The rise of newspapers and magazines meant that tales of the bizarre and the outrageous could circulate widely and quickly, while the rapid increase in printed advertising made it easy to promote stunts and shams. - The Spectator
The idea of reading to help us think better (whatever that means) waxes and wanes with the times: "A decade ago, the fashion was to be pessimistic about the prospects of improving our thinking, and even about the value of thinking at all." - The Guardian (UK)
Underlying this question is a sense that our voices are not seen as philosophers’ voices, but primarily as women’s voices. It is as if women would necessarily have a distinctive point of view, as a group. - Aeon
Some 4 percent of the population experiences this kind of cross-sensory linking, and studies have shown it’s more prevalent in creative people. - Nautilus
A pragmatist ethics calls for prioritising feelings instead of facts, because a truly humanist democracy is sentimentalist rather than rationalist. - Aeon
The anodyne blandness of the term “general education” should not distract us from its critical place in the curriculum. General education forces a question that most institutions today would probably rather avoid: What should all students learn? - The Point
Most elderly people would have flunked a human version of the team’s experiments. But all of the cuttlefish passed, “an incredibly complex thing for an animal to do.” - The Atlantic
Foundational models have some very real downsides. They create “a single point of failure, so any defects, any biases which these models have, any security vulnerabilities . . . are just blindly inherited by all the downstream tasks." - Fast Company
“It doesn’t take someone broken or disturbed to crave that structure . . . we’re wired to. And what we often overlook is that the material with which that scaffolding is built, the very material that fabricates our reality, is language.” - The Baffler
These people are generally well-educated workers who are leaving their jobs not because the pandemic created obstacles to their employment but, at least in part, because it nudged them to rethink the role of work in their lives altogether. - The New Yorker
For Fukuyama, the demise of the Soviet Union testified to the “total exhaustion of viable systemic alternatives” to––and thus, the “unabashed victory”––of “economic and political liberalism.” - Hedgehog Review
It’s not that we don’t think—we are constantly reading, opining, debating—but that we seem to do it on the run, while squinting at trolls in our phones. - The New Yorker
The general public in the United States sees intellectuals as disconnected from their everyday struggles and concerns. From this perspective, intellectuals don’t actually work like the laborers amongst us, but are engaged in a kind of elitist moralizing. - 3 Quarks Daily
