In a year that felt like it changed everything, people also began contemplating how we might rebuild differently, with new ideas about how to fix the climate crisis, how we work, and how we live. – Fast Company
Category: ideas
We Eat Ourselves To Change (?)
Leon Wieseltier: “Everything will be different: this is a ubiquitous sentiment. In all our upheavals — social and epidemiological — so much seems to be wrong and so much seems to be slipping away that one may be forgiven for enjoying a fantasy of total change. All these horrors, all these outrages, all these marches, and the world stays the same? So the first thing that needs to be said in the effort to keep our heads is that everything never changes.” – Liberties Journal
How The Millennial Generation Burned Out
According to Anne Petersen, the main difference between millennials and the rest of the precariat is that we once had such great expectations. Molded in the mythos of meritocracy, our generation was raised to believe that we could beat bad circumstances and secure personal stability — if we simply worked hard enough. This happy ending has not materialized for most of us, and there has been extensive emotional fallout. – Los Angeles Review of Books
What Happens When Independent Machines Make Mistakes (And They Will)?
“Products and services that make decisions autonomously will also need to resolve ethical dilemmas—a requirement that raises additional risks and regulatory and product development challenges. Scholars have now begun to frame these challenges as problems of responsible algorithm design. They include the puzzle of how to automate moral reasoning.” – Harvard Business Review
Could The Arts Help Unify Our Fractures?
“In European nations, “save our cultural institutions” is widely regarded as a necessary cause. In the United States, the same cry is not heard. What is going on? Were the arts always a negligible component of the New World experience, insufficiently cultivated? Or did they become negligible? Are we as a nation simply too young to dig deep expressive roots? Too diverse? Too much crippled by our original sins of slavery and the Indian Wars?” – American Purpose
Understanding The Concept Of Electricity Was Difficult At First
“The strangeness of electricity seemed to be that it was at once ‘so moveable and incapable of rest’ and yet also capable of being arrested if deprived of a suitable conductor, for example, by the air.” – Cabinet
The Argument Over Who Controls The New Digital Public Squares
The speech platforms are rather closer to a form of mass voluntary intellectual pornography: a marketplace that lauds the basest instincts, incentivizes snark and outrage, brings us to revel in the savage burn. – National Affairs
How Consolidation Is Killing Good Art
“The lack of options marketed to consumers has created a missing middle: the zone between mass market and niche market where experimentation is supposed to proliferate and engender variety. Worse, the consolidation of the country’s vast creative sector into fewer, more powerful production and publishing companies has come at the direct expense of the quality of their product.” – The New Republic
If The U.S. Wants To Keep More College Students Enrolled, It Can Try This One Simple Trick
What will it take? Money. Cash money. Direct cash money, to the students, for their survival, with few barriers – and given out quickly. “Many students … aren’t sure they can afford to return for another college semester. They need financial support delivered flexibly, quickly, and respectfully. They should not have to demonstrate their poverty or rehash trauma to merit support.” – The Atlantic
We Could Do More Than Revive The WPA For Artists; We Could Revive CETA
Sure, there was the WPA during the Great Depression. But: “From 1974 to 1982, federal funds provided employment to 10,000 artists nationwide under the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA).” It wasn’t intended to help artists – but a revival could be. – Hyperallergic