Brain rot is marked by a “supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as a result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.” - The Atlantic
Play is something that predates humans. It’s fundamental to how animals engage in and understand the world. It’s how we test and figure out the rules of our environment, how social relationships work. - LA Review of Books
As a child, I felt lucky to be born in 1960. I’d be only 40 in the year 2000 and might live half my life in the magical new century. By the time I was a teenager, however, the spell had broken. The once-enticing future morphed into a place of pollution, overcrowding, and ugliness. - Works in Progress
Background music for commercials, once the domain of human composers, can now be generated by AI in minutes, meeting technical and emotional requirements at a fraction of the cost. Why would a business pay a premium for human creators if AI can deliver similar or better metrics? - Shelly Palmer
With a crazed sense of humor and geysers of gore, these works demand recognition of simple and obvious facts: that looks aren’t everything and that everyone is going to die. Some will even be lucky enough to grow old. Why keep torturing ourselves to deny the truth? - Washington Post (MSN)
Today that anger has festered to the point that we are losing sight of the real enemies of human vitality and imagination. Instead of satire, which aims at improvement, we have snark, derived from the old Low German word snarky, meaning bad-tempered. - Hedgehog Review
The AI's role isn't to automate organization; it's to suggest connections we haven’t considered and amplify our ability to see patterns and possibilities. I like to think of it as inspiration as a service. - Every
But now, “there are multiple somber YouTube video essays about the lack of conviviality in multiplayer lobbies, and most of them bear titles that gesture toward an elemental wound in the culture.” - Slate
Amitav Ghosh says, “The planetary crisis, in the broadest sense, … has been brought about by a story: a story of endless profit, endless growth, of individualism” - and that story starts early in English-language literature. - Irish Times
“Landmark laws across the country have come into existence to preserve things we deem culturally significant. But they don’t always protect what we actually want to save.” - The New York Times
The gambit of Stanford literature professor Adrian Daub’s clarifying new book, The Cancel Culture Panic: How an American Obsession Went Global, is the contention that, in fact, we don’t really know what “cancel culture” is. - The New Republic
“This is the year that people really realized that you can build general-purpose robots,” she said. What is striking about these achievements is that they involve very little explicit programming. The robots’ behavior is learned. - The New Yorker
Nostalgia is a universal malady for which there is no effective remedy, and throughout its long history it has served politically diverse ends. - Washington Post
Sarah Zhang of The Atlantic: “Sometimes, before I understand intellectually why a story is interesting or good, if I feel myself emotionally gravitate to a story, it probably means there’s something there.” - Nieman Lab
“Much of mathematics is driven by intuition, by a deep-rooted sense of what should be true. But sometimes instinct can lead a mathematician astray.” Take the bunkbed hypothesis. - Wired
