"Nearly 60 percent of recent grievances center on what I’d consider lifestyle choices: music and parties and people talking loudly. But one person’s loud is another person’s expression of joy." - The Atlantic
If life in the 1930s was marked by a Great Depression, and the 2010s by a Great Recession, one might say our current decade is marked by a Great Regression. This return to childhood manifests in the things we consume, in how we spend our time, even in the ways our societies are governed. - Aeon
The internet by design has sanded complex ideas down to trending hashtags, stripping subtlety from language and producing younger generations who confuse attention for personal growth. - The Atlantic
And by "people who should know better," we mean certain AI researchers themselves. "The problem is that people closest to the technology live with one foot in the future. They sometimes see what they believe will happen as much as they see what is happening now." - The New York Times
In this future, people are citizens, rather than subjects or consumers. With this identity, it becomes easier to see that all of us are smarter than any of us. And that the strategy for navigating difficult times is to tap into the diverse ideas, energy and resources of everyone. - BBC
Cosmic voids are cosmology at its purest. They are simple. The complications of star formation and black holes don’t impact them because they don’t have any stars or black holes. They are basically big fossils from the earliest days of the universe and their shapes encode the evolution of the universe. - Nautilus
At its worst, cheer can be breezily dishonest, an on-demand feeling that we can project to get what we want. It can also be a burden, especially for women and people of color, many of whom feel pressure to be constantly upbeat. - The Atlantic
Instead of seeing emotions as bequeathed by biology, we might see them as learned: “instilled in us by our parents and other cultural agents,” or “conditioned by recurrent experiences within our cultures.” - The New Yorker
But what exactly is content? Who produces it? Why and how did it come to be viewed as “essential”? And how will content continue to structure our economy, culture, politics, and everyday lives in the future? - Public Books
If we can tear ourselves away from the hype and hysteria that passes for online culture, and stretch out our historico-philosophical telescopes, there really are some interesting things about the broader range of communicating through networks. - 3 Quarks Daily
It turns out that when a multilingual person wants to speak, the languages they know can be active at the same time, even if only one gets used. These languages can interfere with each other, for example intruding into speech just when you don't expect them. - BBC
Human experience is now recorded on something that looks a bit like an informal version of the blockchain – the distributed public ledger whose unforgiving mathematics underpins cryptocurrencies. - The Spectator
How does such a tiny group dominate what we think of as normality? With meticulous research, Sarah Chaney traces the history of such narratives back to the year 1800, when the word “normal” was simply a mathematical term designating a line at a right angle. - The Guardian
The machine world is a binary world, and it strikes me that we have learned to apply those zeroes and ones to our thinking, intensifying our impulse to sort one another into like-me and not-like-me at what might well be, historically speaking, the worst possible moment. - The Guardian
