Digitalization has affected both the demand and supply for cultural content. Increasingly sophisticated technology and adoption of digital devices to experience things remote because of the pandemic have developed a taste for new ways to “tour” museums, “attend” theatre and participate in book readings. - The Conversation
Peter Turchin has been warning for a decade that a few key social and political trends portend an “age of discord,” civil unrest and carnage worse than most Americans have experienced. - The Atlantic
There are a range of moral questions surrounding how we should respond to the immoral acts of artists whose work we love. But, for art lovers, a central aspect of revelations about artists’ behaviour is how it makes us feel. - Psyche
While employers rethink office buildings on the micro scale, cities and regions need to grapple with how to efficiently use their office-dominated downtowns, which are their most central and easy-to-access places. - The Atlantic
Looking outside your industry for strategy improvements and breakthroughs is a good approach. The core reason why it doesn’t work more often is inertia. - Harvard Business Review
"The show’s fake commercial for Amazon Go illustrated the disparity that white and Black consumers might experience in a store promoting freedom but mired by surveillance." - The Atlantic
"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
