It seems reasonable to pose the question of art’s relation to politics in the context of the specific crisis that democracy seems to have entered within the past 10 years or so. The dominant intellectual responses to this crisis have, if anything, pushed the arts further outside the sphere of political relevance. - Aeon
At the heart of such suspicion is the assumption that persuasion is to be understood as an act done by someone to someone. One party is active, the other party is passive. - Psyche
Today’s boredom is not hungry, a response to deprivation; it is a loss of cultural appetite, in response to the surfeit of claims on your attention and time.” - The New Yorker
We got stuck with this particular version of nonbinary identity—singularly focused on pronouns, clumsy corporate integration, and iconoclastic affect—because nonbinary identity has become a brand. It is both a way of being in the world and an empty signifier. - The Baffler
We often talk about cooperation in glowing terms, associating it with ideas of virtue and morality. But viewing cooperation solely as a force for good betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how evolution works. - The Guardian
Unless you think—and some philosophers do think this—that the large-scale future consequences of our practices don’t matter at all, it’s hard to see how the technical tools used to predict and quantify those consequences could be a poor fit for a book of applied ethics. - City Journal
"The point isn’t that there’s something wrong with working from an office. It’s that there’s something right about working from home." Now, what does this mean for the arts? - The New York Times
Though the true past is fixed and unrevisable, stories about that past are not. Palaeontologists understand these stories as theories, but their audiences often experience them in the same ways they would experience fictional tales – as narratives that shift with mood and politics and time. - Aeon
The overwhelming majority of the output of these AI language models is grammatically correct. And yet, there are no grammar templates or rules hardwired into them – they rely on linguistic experience alone, messy as it may be. - The Conversation
Pleasure activists believe that, by tapping into the potential goodness in each of us, we can generate justice and liberation, growing a healing abundance where we have been socialized to believe only scarcity exists. - Boston Review
There are two kinds of things in the world: the good and the indifferents. Note that the first is singular, the second, plural. For there is only one good. ‘What is it?’ you may well ask. - 3 Quarks Daily
The better approach is to cultivate an appreciation for our ignorance, get comfortable with it and look at it very closely, disentangling it as much as possible from our ego to see what’s really there (or not there). - 3 Quarks Daily
Just ask the writers of the 18th century like Coleridge and Shelley (perhaps not Mary Shelley, whose experience was, well, different). - The Guardian (UK)
