Ardent hobbyists are often viewed as eccentric. I think they might be the only normal people left. As a rule, they are active and engaged. They are more interested in making than consuming. They dream and they do. - Unherd
We cannot truly understand our own time and place without a serious understanding of other times and places. Strangely enough, the priming effect, as manifested in the search for politically relevant hooks, actively prevents that understanding. - Hedgehog Review
Partners who are at first judged to be powerful or strong become controlling or overbearing after a breakup. People who are nice become pushovers. Successful people become workaholics. - BBC
Optimism is, after all, by its nature delusional; ‘realism’ or outright pessimism might seem more justifiable given the troubles of the present and the uncertainties of the future. - Psyche
The effort spent trying to impress others; the dazzling meals I was too tired to cook but cook I did; the Guardian column that I just couldn’t stop tinkering with. What can get lost in all this are the ordinary feelings and parts of myself that have ended up neglected, because I didn’t consider them dazzling enough. - The...
As conversational AI agents become more interactive and personalized, they will surpass human influencers in their ability to shape our decisions without us realizing it. - Big Think
I believe we need to blow up the outdated, embedded public stereotypes of art and culture, and fashion a wholesale public reimagining of what the sector can really do. And this is the perfect time to do it. - The Tyee
“The Substance is a mess, full of sound and fury, signifying little, with Moore given scant else to do besides ‘react with horror to her latest mutation.’ Indeed, Moore is, well, just fine in it.” (Note: Sometimes, that’s not why people win Oscars … sadly.) - Slate
Praise or blame Col Needham, “he is in many ways one of the last remaining relics of the promise of the internet, of a community-minded goodness that gave rise to other user-run platforms.” His site, the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), turns 35 this year. - Washington Post (Yahoo)
“Democracy cannot get underway without the kind of imaginative experiment that literature provides, a perspective provided by the rearrangement of temporal and spatial coordinates that suggest that the parameters of this world are not the limits of all possible worlds.” - LitHub
But - unsurprisingly! - the accuracy leaves a lot to be desired. For instance, a Pompeii “reconstruction” ignores the actual eyewitness account of Pliny the Younger. - BBC
In Brazil, for instance, “museum director Niomar Moniz Sodré Bittencourt hid artworks and advised artists on how to leave the country after officials from the country’s military regime entered her museum and demanded the removal of ‘dangerous’ images.” - The Guardian (UK)
“The uncensored literature flooding the country wasn’t reaching Poles by chance. It was sent as part of a decades-long US intelligence operation ... designed, in the words of the programme’s leader, George Minden, to assault the eastern bloc with an ‘offensive of free, honest thinking.’” - The Guardian (UK)
The evolution of cooperation has been of interest to biologists, philosophers and anthropologists for centuries. If natural selection favours self-interest, why would we cooperate at an apparent cost to ourselves? - Aeon
