ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

IDEAS

The Teddy Roosevelt Presidential Library Will Be A Different Experience

“The visionaries behind the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library hope a visit to the Medora, North Dakota-based library will prove as restorative to people in the modern era as this area once was for Roosevelt.” - Fast Company

Neuroscientists Find Music Can Powerfully Reshape Memory

In other words, positive music increased the likelihood of recalling stories with added positive elements, and negative music increased the likelihood of negative elaborations. - PsyPost

College Students Are Using AI To Do Their Assignments. Is It Cheating?

When he started at Columbia as a sophomore this past September, he didn’t worry much about academics or his GPA. “Most assignments in college are not relevant,” he told me. “They’re hackable by AI, and I just had no interest in doing them.” - New York Times (MSN)

Has American Popular Culture Stagnated?

For what it’s worth, most Americans share this sense of declinism when it comes to movies, music, and TV, telling pollsters that these things peaked somewhere between the 1970s and the 2000s. - Noahpinion

Why We Should Learn To Be More Skeptical… Of Our Own Ideas

Even our educational institutions often teach critical thinking as a weapon to dismantle others’ arguments rather than a tool for examining our own. The skill we most desperately need is the very one we’ve neglected to cultivate: the ability to hold our own certainties in suspension. - Psyche

Universities Are Debating AI. But There’s Not Much Consensus

There are many in the humanities, and even more outside the humanities, who would argue that what is important to assess are thoughts, ideas, creative capacity itself, and that being nitpicky about ChatGPT wrongly shifts the focus to what is essentially just a matter of words. - The Point

Will English Eventually Vanish From The Earth?

It feels unlikely right now, but why not? Almost every other language has. - The Guardian (UK)

What The United States Could Have Been

Reconstruction, when? - New York Review of Books

Disney Has A New Location

And a bunch of Disney adults are not exactly thrilled about it. “It’s another fracture within one of the largest and most intense fandoms, one that I think signals trouble for Disney’s generational appeal.” - Spitfire News

Extraterrestrial Languages Could Be So Much Stranger Than We’ve Ever Imagined

The space of possible languages is vast, and full of exotic languages that are much weirder and stranger than any we have yet imagined. We should explore what those might be – and for more than intellectual curiosity alone. - Aeon

Why AI Can’t Be Your Friend

Sycophancy is a common feature of chatbots: A 2023 paper by researchers from Anthropic found that it was a “general behavior of state-of-the-art AI assistants,” and that large language models sometimes sacrifice “truthfulness” to align with a user’s views.  - The Atlantic (MSN)

How Our Brains Take On The Rhythm Of Music

Rather than passively perceiving music, the brain physically embodies it, synchronizing with musical patterns to produce sensations of timing, musical pleasure, and even the impulse to move. - Earth.com

How To Respond Thoughtfully To Offensive Comments

 Rather than freezing, fleeing or fighting, I propose that you forge. Forging ahead is an intentional approach to engaging with people who say or write offensive, disparaging, insulting or discriminating words. - Psyche

Our Depopulation Crisis

Fewer working-age adults entails a shrinking tax base, even as the need for public services swells. Education, healthcare, infrastructure, public safety and welfare will be underfunded. The pie will shrink. And as lifespans grow, the demand for healthcare will increase while the number of healthcare workers decreases. - Aeon

Why Do So Many Artists Come From Broken Homes?

Paradoxical though it may seem, studies have found that many creative people had difficult childhoods. Indeed, many well-known artists owe their genius to tough childhood events, from which they escaped by creating mental worlds where they were free to develop their talents. - PsyPost

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