ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

IDEAS

Your Fitbit Is Only A Materialistic Delusion Of Who You Are

In a world flooded with such new devices, it is not at all surprising to find that many people now are not even aware of any aspiration to self-knowledge beyond what may be revealed by the AppleWatch or the Fitbit. - Unherd

Where Do Our Minds Go When We’re Under Anesthesia?

So far, scientists have learned that, generally speaking, anesthetic drugs render people unconscious by altering how parts of the brain communicate. But they still don’t fully understand why. - Nautilus

The Next Generation Of Gig-Share Is Worker Co-ops

“Platform co-ops offer a more democratic and equitable alternative to traditional companies, and they have the potential to create good jobs, boost local economies, and increase resilience in the face of future shocks.” - Wired

We Live In The Golden Age Of Scams

If COVID-19 has been an X-ray of society’s fracture points, scammers have not only looked at the film but pressed on the wounds. Since the start of the pandemic, both prophylactic and postexposure measures have been rife with fraud. - Harper's

The Man Who Declared The End Of History Goes To War With History

It turns out that Francis Fukuyama doesn’t like what history’s end has wrought. Liberalism has been corrupted by bad actors on all sides who have lost faith in its tenets: free speech, universal tolerance, and human equality. - The Baffler

The Real Power Of Our Age: Fandom

"For me, at least, fandom has started to feel like a phenomenon akin to cryptocurrency or economic populism—a history-shaping force that we’d be foolish to ignore." - The New Yorker

The Ghosts Inhabiting Cities

Most metropolises are overrun with ghosts; from New York to London, Mumbai to Shanghai, a simple Google search throws up an encyclopaedia’s worth of results about urban legends based on things that go bump in the dark. - Aeon

What The Ancients Knew That Seems So Familiar Today

"It’s really quite strange that people from so long ago seem to have understood so much. And, if you’re looking at things like sexual relations, it’s amazing: there’s hardly a permutation that has not been covered by a myth. They knew everything." - The New Yorker

The Value Of Thought Experiments

There are – allegedly – occasions when we come to understand something about the world via a peculiar kind of experiment that takes place only in the mind. Thought experiments, as they’re known, are an exercise of pure imagination. - Aeon

Just Whom Did The Industrial Revolution Benefit?

When we talk about labor-saving devices, whose labor is saved, exactly? It’s women’s labor. But during the industrial era, the household work traditionally performed by men became more completely replaced by technology than the household work traditionally performed by women. - 3 Quarks Daily

When A Legacy Newspaper Opens An Official Finsta

The 404 is the Los Angeles Times' new Finsta - slang for "fake instagram," usually an account for a closer group of friends or family - and is staffed not to spread the paper's journalism but "continually inventing new types of experimental content." OK, #cool. - Los Angeles Times

Google’s AI Issue Shows Us A Human Logical Fallacy

We hear fluent speech, we think "fluent thought." But wait: "The human brain is hardwired to infer intentions behind words" - even where there is none. - Fast Company

If We’re Truly Living In A Simulation, The Beings Running It Are, To Put It Mildly, Problematic

"Suppose we are now willing to regard it as a live possibility that we really are living in a simulation. How much would it matter? Should it profoundly shake our understanding of the cosmos and our place in it?" - Slate

Unpave A Parking Lot, Make Paradise

Or at least that was Milan's approach, even before the pandemic, when the city started turning 250,000 square feet of parking lots into playgrounds, picnic areas, and other car-free zones that turned out to be a true boon when COVID hit. - Fast Company

Which White British Guy’s Vision Of A Nightmare Society Are We Trapped In?

Aldous Huxley or George Orwell? Well, we thought it was Orwell. But now? "We are back to the future. Back to the Brave New World narcotic of media content that takes our mind off everything." - LitHub

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