"Abusers are often shielded not only by this “myth of authenticity,” but by another myth, which pervades all the performing arts, and indeed all the other arts as well. This is an age-old myth, at least as old as Romanticism. The myth is that the constraint of usual social norms and rules is bad for artists. They have to...
Calling a person an animal is usually a comment on their unrestrained appetites, especially for food (‘like a hungry animal’), for sex (‘they went at it like animals’), and for violence (‘they’re like wild animals’). We also have purpose-made insults comparing people to specific kinds of animal: pig, chicken, rat, cow, slug, snake, cockroach, bitch, etc. - Psyche
A war is on between the tech titans and a relentless generation of largely digital-native reporters looking to speak truth to power while racking up Twitter followers in the process. Depending on whom you ask, the great Tech vs. Media Standoff of 2020–21 is either a “fake fight” between “20 people and 500 other people,” all quick to take...
The goal is to "invite people who have not been thinking about this topic to really think about it in their day-to-day work. It really creates the culture of control, culture of responsibility and understanding." - Protocol
Perhaps it is that architects speak in a special language, and what looks to me like an arbitrary and ugly assortment of random stark rectangles is, to them, a kind of Morse code saying “Hello! Come inside! Happy to have you here.” But if that is the case, it doesn’t redeem the buildings for architects to have designed them...
Philosophers have long warned that this desire for certainty can lead us astray. To think and learn about the world, we must be willing to be uncertain: to accept that we don’t yet know everything. - American Scholar
Indeed, these verbal hesitations have been viewed as undesirable since the days of ancient Greece and, more recently, the American linguist Noam Chomsky characterised them as ‘errors’ irrelevant to language. But could there be more to these utterances than initially meets the ear? - Aeon
"The exact targets of CRT’s critics vary wildly, but it is obvious that most critics simply do not know what they are talking about. Instead, CRT functions for the right today primarily as an empty signifier for any talk of race and racism at all, a catch-all specter lumping together “multiculturalism,” “wokeism,” “anti-racism,” and “identity politics”—or indeed any suggestion...
Today, we can see music, theatre, visual art, and new movies all from our chairs, couches, and beds. A year ago, not so much - heck, even the Louvre has put its entire collection online. "Many larger institutions like the Parisian giant had already made significant strides before last year to increase their online presence. But the rest of the cultural sector was forced...
Dance, publishing, painting, music, and the stage - having an example, an inspiration, and a mentor in the house can both block and encourage young artists as they decide what to do with their lives. - CBC
Fraud - and 8.5 million (Eight. Point. Five. Million.) bot comments secretly created by ISPs to urge against net neutrality. To be fair, there were millions of other fake comments, but according to the New York Attorney General's report, "the astroturfing effort by the broadband industry stood out because it used real people's names without their consent, with third-party firms...
"People become more prone to misinformation when three things happen. First, and perhaps most important, is when conditions in society make people feel a greater need for what social scientists call ingrouping — a belief that their social identity is a source of strength and superiority, and that other groups can be blamed for their problems." - The New...
"My own favoured explanation, in The Decadent Society, is adapted from the American sociologist Robert Nisbet’s arguments about how cultural golden ages hold traditional and novel forces in creative tension: the problem for the Western world is that this tension snapped during the revolutions of the 1960s, when the baby boomers (and the pre-boomer innovators they followed) were too...
Any given work—1984, say, or Bonnie and Clyde—isn’t much of anything until it becomes a counter in other people’s games. How much pure hucksterism is involved on the part of the cultural arbiters, as opposed to astute positioning of worthy work so that it will thrive in the market, can be hard to tell. - The Atlantic
“Some glitches are mild, like an Alexa that randomly giggles (or wakes you in the middle of the night, as happened to one of us), or an iPhone that auto-corrects what was meant as ‘Happy Birthday, dear Theodore’ into ‘Happy Birthday, dead Theodore. But others—like algorithms that promote fake news or bias against job applicants—can be serious problems.” -...
