ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

IDEAS

Why Nostalgia Is Taking Over Television

What an expert says: "In times of disagreement and dissent, nostalgia peaks. COVID was an example of what stimulates nostalgia. … Vintage TV wants to slow you down.” - HuffPost

How The Artists Of The Third Generation Since The Holocaust Are Dealing With Historical Trauma

“The third-generation perspective on the Holocaust is carefully hedged, defiantly distanced, explicitly filtered, supremely self-aware. These stories fundamentally do not belong to the writers or artists.” - The New York Times

Can Democracy Survive?

Anne Appelbaum, who has written many a book on autocratic dictators, says there’s a real case for optimism, or at least against pessimism. “It is easier just to accept the idea of decline. But let’s remember what’s at stake.” - The Atlantic

The Thirty-Year-Old Encrypted Code That Helped End Apartheid

Once apartheid fell apart, the man who created the code encrypted the disk it was on - and eventually forgot the password. - Wired

How To Write The Biography Of A Woman

“Dilemmas on how to depict a woman so that she is taken seriously and how to navigate the archival violence previously done against her, is something biographers of women must think about.” - LitHub

The Culture In Agriculture

In Wisconsin, “'The Hay Rake Ballet' in an alfalfa field — set to opera music in front of a rapt crowd who oohed and aahed at every lift of the rakes used to move hay into rows — was a hit of the Farm/Art D'Tour.” - The New York Times

Can One Make Money On OnlyFans Without Making Content About Sex?

"For every university student raising cash by sharing nudes, there’s a wholesome housewife uploading DIY tips or an up-and-coming musician posting his latest tracks.” Is OnlyFans the next TikTok? - Wired

The Greatest American Art Form Started In Britain

But the U.S. comprehensively remade horror - particularly historical horror, starting, but far from ending, with the Salem witch trials: “The bad conscience of the colonizers that comes back to haunt their descendants is racialized.” - Slate

How Our Brains Predict What The World Is

A big idea known as predictive processing says that your experience of the world is a simulated model constructed by your brain... In our brain’s pursuit to plan, survive, and achieve our goals, it has learned how to guess what the world is actually like based on incoming sensory data. - Vox

Study: How Our Brains Attach Meaning To Words

They’ve discovered that the brain uses contextual clues to decipher meaning, implying that understanding words and sentences is a dynamic, interpretive process. - Harvard Magazine

Philosopher Finds Logical Fallacy In The Way Patents Are Awarded

He explains that patent offices, when assessing an invention's patentability, have been inadvertently examining the cognitive abilities of the inventor rather than the invention itself. He suggests this introduces dangerous subjectivity into the process, in terms of varying indirect interpretations of an inventor's intellectual capacity, rather than on the technical merits of the invention. - Phys

How Does Someone Become the “Voice Of A Generation”?

What’s behind this phenomenon is generational thinking. It seems to be everywhere at the moment, providing the media with easy taglines, spreading cliches and unnecessarily sowing division. But its history goes back far beyond even the baby-boomers. - The Conversation

The Problem With Malcom Gladwell’s Ideas

The problem is that he has chosen to be a farm stand that serves salty, fatty, sugary pseudo-thinking. His signature methodology is to convey relatively boilerplate, already well-known ideas, by rebranding the ideas and wrapping them in stories. And the lubricant of this engine is turning everything into little mysteries. - The New York Times

Surrealism Wasn’t The Only Way World War I Affected The Arts

"Was it nihilism and defeatist anomie that the war ushered in? … Perhaps what the First World War released above all was a spirit of ephemerality. Perhaps it was the notion of artistic durability that then began its long, slow death." - History Today

Study: How Authenticity Matters

The emotional and psychological ties people have with places contribute to their perception of authenticity. Just as much as the exposed bricks and wooden floors, it’s because of its community connections and personalised atmosphere that a centuries-old pub in London can feel more authentic than a commercialised pub in the United States. - Psyche

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