If a secret really is something I tell only myself, is there something here that is mine and mine alone, that survives as my true ‘self’, more basic than the many roles I play out socially? - Aeon
Reporting for this story, I spoke with multiple people who are essentially funemployed, or at least one meaning of it, who sit around at work all day with very little to do. What was most surprising was that many did not exactly love the situation and felt somewhat conflicted. - Vox
Numerous studies have shown that, due to a myriad of cognitive biases such as belief perseverance and confirmation bias, facts unfortunately do not change people’s minds. Propaganda, on the other hand, works very well on this front, something we see clearly from how people and groups have used it over the past century. - Psyche
New scholarship indicates that the end of the Cold War did not so much settle history’s debates as it did undermine the structuring framework of American politics. - Public Books
After a century or so, as Dave Hickey explains, in which it had evaded institutional control—a century of Parisian bohemians, modernist vagabonds, and visionary wackjobs, of Rimbaud, van Gogh, Nijinsky, Cage, Gertrude Stein, et al.—art was being standardized and, more importantly, moralized. The audience, in other words, was being normed as well. - Tablet
The essays in “On Women” make clear that, for Sontag, the oppression of women presented an aesthetic and narrative problem as well as a political and economic one. - The New Yorker
How would we deal with artificial beings with rich capacities for thought, experience, and feeling? What are our obligations to them? What of their freedom and dignity? - 3 Quarks Daily
OK, and this is possibly unexpected, "Coloring within the lines — of an intricate pattern, for example — appears to be especially effective" at dealing with anxiety. - The New York Times
What? "If its full storage capacity was purposed for music, a modern iPhone or Samsung Galaxy could hold hundreds of thousands of downloaded songs, representing more than 1 million minutes of audio. And yet those same phones will sometimes whine that your voicemail is full." - The Atlantic
But it's all about persistence, not fairy dust: "The serial-order effect applies to tasks that last minutes or days, but creativity also improves across years, decades, and even careers." - The Atlantic
That's what Google's new chatbot can be, at least according to one author, who let it write some wedding-related emails. And it's really, really good at consumer complaints. - Wired
Today, all serious historians and archaeologists acknowledge that the cross-fertilization of “Western” and “non‐Western” cultures happened throughout human history, and that the modern West owes much of its cultural DNA to a wide range of non‐European and non‐white forebears. - Smithsonian
He was one of the first who saw machines had something to offer to the artistic process. The artistic technique for which Warhol became best known treated the mechanical part of the process, the screen print, as a transformative element, even though it was technically “just” a recreation of something that already existed. - Tedium
