As conversational AI agents become more interactive and personalized, they will surpass human influencers in their ability to shape our decisions without us realizing it. - Big Think
I believe we need to blow up the outdated, embedded public stereotypes of art and culture, and fashion a wholesale public reimagining of what the sector can really do. And this is the perfect time to do it. - The Tyee
“The Substance is a mess, full of sound and fury, signifying little, with Moore given scant else to do besides ‘react with horror to her latest mutation.’ Indeed, Moore is, well, just fine in it.” (Note: Sometimes, that’s not why people win Oscars … sadly.) - Slate
Praise or blame Col Needham, “he is in many ways one of the last remaining relics of the promise of the internet, of a community-minded goodness that gave rise to other user-run platforms.” His site, the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), turns 35 this year. - Washington Post (Yahoo)
“Democracy cannot get underway without the kind of imaginative experiment that literature provides, a perspective provided by the rearrangement of temporal and spatial coordinates that suggest that the parameters of this world are not the limits of all possible worlds.” - LitHub
But - unsurprisingly! - the accuracy leaves a lot to be desired. For instance, a Pompeii “reconstruction” ignores the actual eyewitness account of Pliny the Younger. - BBC
In Brazil, for instance, “museum director Niomar Moniz Sodré Bittencourt hid artworks and advised artists on how to leave the country after officials from the country’s military regime entered her museum and demanded the removal of ‘dangerous’ images.” - The Guardian (UK)
“The uncensored literature flooding the country wasn’t reaching Poles by chance. It was sent as part of a decades-long US intelligence operation ... designed, in the words of the programme’s leader, George Minden, to assault the eastern bloc with an ‘offensive of free, honest thinking.’” - The Guardian (UK)
The evolution of cooperation has been of interest to biologists, philosophers and anthropologists for centuries. If natural selection favours self-interest, why would we cooperate at an apparent cost to ourselves? - Aeon
If we could stop bickering about which creatures do or don’t deserve to be called smart, an emerging movement of scientists and philosophers argue that we might discover fundamental elements of intelligence that are common to all life. - Noema
Only recently has the human collective begun accepting the fact it is itself mortal. We now appreciate that events unfolded for aeons before us and that our species can disappear, never to return. One day, the cosmos will persist without human witness, nor any inherent tendency to manifest things we cherish. - Aeon
“The first half of the 20th century … was ‘extraordinarily social.’ Shared spaces—libraries, theaters, and playgrounds—were rapidly built across the U.S. People were gathering regularly in public, and participating in clubs and organizations with their peers.” Then things changed, drastically, and not because of cell phones. - The Atlantic (Yahoo)
