"Contemporary Americans are relatively inexperienced with infectious disease compared with our ancestors; in search of explanations, many have reached for what seems closest at hand in popular culture and popular history, where the plague has always loomed large." - Slate
After Area 405's building was put on the market in a time of rapidly rising property values or what some might call gentrification (a brewery just opened around the corner), a massive campaign and fundraising effort meant the artists got to kept their space. - Baltimore Sun
Colombia's culture minister: “What, for me, would be the greatest win or success for Encanto — aside from the three award nominations in the Oscars — is how the world now sees Colombia. ... We’re no longer seen just as the country of drug lords." - The New York Times
The larger problem with worshipping work is that it sucks up employees’ interest and energy in any kind of civic engagement in neighborhoods, cities, local and national politics. “Techtopia,” she writes, “is corroding the collective capacity to build and sustain the common good.” - Religion News
As more become victims of the city’s fantasies of walling itself off from the climate crisis, what is increasingly obvious is the city’s willingness to sacrifice the older and more decrepit areas—those spaces occupied by the poor and undocumented—to benefit the growth of new and more “resilient” spaces for the wealthy. - The Baffler
It used to be thought that forgetting anything — from minor things like the name of a casual acquaintance to the more painful loss of cherished memories experienced by my patients — was caused, to varying degrees, by a failure of the brain’s memory mechanisms. But new developments in neuroscience over the past decade or so refute this simple...
The processes of intelligence are so intricate, so multilayered and baroque, no wonder some people might be tempted by stories about a top-down Creator. But we know evolution must have been able to come up with intelligence on its own, from the bottom up. - Aeon
So is a country’s level of media literacy anything more than a measure of the wealth and the education of its population? How can we tell if a country’s disinformation curriculum is the reason its population is relatively protected against online falsehoods? - The New York Times
A common mistake is to confuse a country with its inhabitants with its government. This leads to statements that are strictly meaningless at best and deeply misleading at worst because they are category errors on the order of ‘Green ideas sleep furiously’. - 3 Quarks Daily
The Italian communist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) would argue that it was precisely through the proliferation of such norms in our culture—wherein the inequalities of capitalism appear natural, as “senso comune” (common sense)—that the ruling classes stay as such. - BookForum
For years now, each day has brought a torrent of new TV shows to watch, movies to see, albums to listen to, podcasts and YouTube videos and now Substack newsletters to check out. Living in the digital era has meant existing in a perpetual state of “How can I possibly get to it all?” - Boston Globe
Tourism is attractive because it underwrites a desire that, when we go overseas, stuff doesn’t get too strange, risky or foreign. Increasingly, we travel not to decentre our worldviews or challenge our sensibilities, but to chillax and populate our Instagrams. - The Guardian
The maturity of the subscription market varies by industry, but in some of the categories best known for these kinds of services, there are indicators that the ceiling is close, at least in the United States. - The Atlantic
"Westerns aren’t about gunfights or stagecoaches. They’re about how an extreme landscape boils human storytelling down to the essentials. ... The Western is Greek tragedy for America’s rugged individualism—and also for its machismo." - The Atlantic