Part of the appeal is that calling someone resilient in the endurance sense sounds kind. It feels like encouragement rather than judgment. But communicating kindness without taking any responsibility is just a way to make yourself feel more comfortable – that everything will be OK. - Psyche
The findings are the first to show that both participating in arts activities and attending events, such as viewing an exhibition, lead to people staying biologically younger. - The Guardian
The pressures on higher education seem extraordinary, even to someone like me, who is generally convinced that real change is rare, perhaps especially when it comes to America’s tried-and-tested system for replicating its élites. - The New Yorker
"I keep having conversations with grown, discerning adults whose chief metric for their enjoyment of a book, show or movie is how relevant it is, how directly it speaks, to the granular particulars of their lived experience.” - NPR
Amid the current cultural backlash against progressive ideas, today’s debate on consciousness reflects our human fears of belonging to the same family as inanimate matter and losing our dear, transcendent souls. - Noema
From the original, nineteenth-century form popularized by Balzac, Zola, and Stendhal to the “lyrical” variant of today, the verisimilitude that realism pursues—not just lifelikeness, but worldlikeness—is meant to convince us the novel is, for want of a better term, natural. - Boston Review
Some participants were given access to an AI assistant capable of solving the problem autonomously. When the AI helper was suddenly taken away, these people were significantly more likely to give up on the problem or flub their answers. - Wired
The idea of photographic memory is simple and powerful: Experience is captured objectively, stored completely and retrieved perfectly. See it once, keep it forever. There’s just one problem. There’s no scientific evidence it exists. - The Conversation
We don’t value human creations solely for their beauty or their price tag. We also value them because they embody deliberate labour and expertise. - The Conversation
We are taught from a young age that matter is made of atoms, built from particles such as electrons, and electrons are not built from anything else. For this reason, these particles are sometimes said to be fundamental. But are they? Is the Universe really made from the smallest constituents? - Aeon
The worry that the country is building too many data centers now coexists with the fear that we won’t have enough of them to satisfy the public’s growing appetite for these products. And the company previously known as OpenAI’s junior competitor has become possibly the fastest-growing business in the history of capitalism. - The Atlantic
“As great as humans are, we can still be impressed by how birds navigate, how ants cooperate, and how spiders hunt. Each of these animals has been shaped by its environment to be smart in a different way.” - The Guardian (UK)
Competing studies find that Portland can support one performing arts center or maybe two performing arts centers, or not. And of course, "Portland has appointed a number of advisory committees to study the choices more closely before holding public hearings to make a final decision.” - Oregon ArtsWatch
