"I desperately want everyone to witness the euphoric tactical flourishes and wonderful social interactions that a great board game can foster in the right environment, but I have also come to understand that for some people, a pile of cardboard will always be a pile of cardboard." - Slate
Let's rethink the whole thing. "Seeing a work of art as indissolubly linked with an individual creator’s technical skills is a worn-out myth. The further we develop, the more this link displays its conventionality." - Los Angeles Review of Books
“A lot of us wanted to believe that we had free and open discussions in this country, and that we can talk about anything, and that we can make changes. It sounds great as cocktail-party chitchat, when we are all in the room with the same beliefs.” - Christian Science Monitor
Recall the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. A straw is a very small thing, it weighs almost nothing, but it can bring down a thousand-pound camel. Or consider how small cracks can grow until they eventually destroy the largest structures. That’s how failures occur. - Tablet
To suggest the Classical inheritance is monocultural, or “pale, male and stale”, is to do a disservice to the patchwork of cultures, backgrounds, outlooks and beliefs that fed into what we now receive as the Classics. - The Critic
The real project of humanity – of understanding ourselves as human beings, making a good world to live in, and striving together toward mutual flourishing – depends paradoxically upon the continued pursuit of what Hitz calls ‘splendid uselessness’. - Psyche
One estimate is that 99.9% of internet content will be AI-generated by 2030. The future, in other words, will be by bots and for bots. But isn’t that a lot of what the internet is already? - Tablet
Scientists exploring our ability to recall shapes say people can make mistakes after just a few seconds – a phenomenon the team have called short-term memory illusions. - The Guardian
"If you need to cover your hair for work in a fast-food restaurant, which would work better, a paper sandwich wrapper or a hamburger bun? GPT-3 went for the bun." - Fast Company
In 2021, psychologists found that forming parasocial bonds was strongly related to avoidant attachment. That is, people who tended to push others away in their day-to-day lives were more likely than others to relate to fictional characters, and especially to characters who are also emotionally avoidant. - The Atlantic
It’s suddenly plausible to imagine that freethinking, that tradition of poking and prodding at all fixed ideas and institutions, will drift into obsolescence, because an oracular machine will instantly spit back answers to life’s questions with an aura of scientific authority. - The Atlantic
AI poses a threat to work opportunities across the board by giving producers the tools to recreate their favourite voices on demand, without the performer’s knowledge or consent and without additional compensation. - The Walrus
Though there are many theories about the place of imagination in cognitive architecture, two are worth mentioning here, not least because all others can be traced to them. - Psyche
Arguments for anger tend to frame themselves in terms of empowerment: in the face of oppression, we should not feel grief, sadness, or fear—we should feel anger. Anger motivates action. Anger is empowering. That seems clearly true. - LA Review of Books
