Until last year, the crowd was the trademark of the city. All through the day and night, people shoaled together, hurrying through streets, dawdling in parks, jostling at protests, concerts and football matches, like so many bees in a hive. Pre-pandemic, any film that wanted to kindle an atmosphere of eeriness needed only to show one of the world’s...
For the past five years, conservatives have been howling about the alleged censoriousness of the American left, in particular on college campuses. But the denial of tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones shows that the real conflict is over how American society understands its present inequalities. - The Atlantic
"There is going to be massive disruption. The technology is developing very rapidly, possibly exponentially. But people are linear. When linear people are faced with exponential change, they’re not going to be able to adapt to that very easily. So clearly, something is coming… And clearly AI is going to win . It’s not even close. How people are...
Some philosophers have pushed against such reductive approaches and argued for a framework that recognises the complexity and multidimensionality of persons. The network self view emerges from this trend. It began in the later 20th century and has continued in the 21st, when philosophers started to move toward a broader understanding of selves. Some philosophers propose narrative and anthropological...
The five honorees said that the six-month delay, and the loss of so many performance opportunities and spaces during the pandemic, made this weeklong celebration even more important. Midori: "This is a blessing, but this is also encouragement, and a motivation for me to be able to continue to connect with others, and to collaborate and to anticipate a...
"We urbanites, who dwell in the medium of public political discussion, also live in the element of opinion. Leo Strauss loved to intimate that a few of us could instead live in the element of knowledge, as if he were hanging up a shingle that read ‘Secrets, this way!’ The irony of saying such a thing in public is...
With VR evolving at its current rate, movie nights or game nights could eventually turn into cyber nights, a new norm for those under 35. Games would no longer need to be marketed towards one group or identity, and would enable a more casual audience to approach virtual worlds without the traditional complexities. For more experienced audiences, this would...
It was a Cambridge professor of literature, almost a century ago in the aftermath of World War I, who pioneered a view of cognition we can recognize as strikingly modern, and who appreciated what we are only now beginning to rediscover: the great potential of interactions between the narrative arts and brain science. - Nautilus
The students who used the Aboriginal memory technique were three times more likely to remember the entire list than they were before they were trained in this type of recall. The memory palace group were about twice as likely to recall the whole list, and the control group only improved by 50%. - Cosmos
While the number of visitors remains below the threshold, tourists use services and provisions designed for residents. Once this threshold is crossed, however, residents are forced to use services designed for tourists. - Daily Beast
To be burned out is to be used up, like a battery so depleted that it can’t be recharged. In people, unlike batteries, it is said to produce the defining symptoms of “burnout syndrome”: exhaustion, cynicism, and loss of efficacy. Around the world, three out of five workers say they’re burned out. A 2020 U.S. study put that figure...
"There is another thing the rest of us, the audience, do not fully appreciate: the crisis is rooted in the destruction that was visited upon the arts even before the pandemic—that is, in the scandal of free content, which has been going on for more than twenty years and which implicates us all." - Harper's
"When you aggregate hundreds of predictions, the result is a special, concentrated kind of wrong. Everyone was trying their best, and everyone missed. And these 40-year-old predictions don’t seem wrong in the fun, steampunk way that, say, late Victorian predictions of personal blimps or hot-air-ballooning robots might seem wrong. They’re just saggy middle-aged predictions." - Wired
Two geology professors built a 3D replica of Sardinia, and it worked so well (including providing a vital connection for lonely, isolated students to socialize) that one of the profs then "spent three weeks in the Scottish Highlands, driving around and taking loads of drone shots, which he used to recreate the landscape around the village of Kinlochleven, another...
The one thing movie crew members - at least the vaccinated ones - can give up is face shields. One guild member says, "As the studios have negotiated the way forward with the unions and there are still insurance risk factors for studios and production companies, it’s not really up to us as individuals — if we want to...
