Category: ideas

“Just as apocalyptic dystopias, with or without zombies, have become common fare on Netflix and in highbrow literature alike, societal collapse and its associated terms — “fragility” and “resilience,” “risk” and “sustainability” — have become the objects of extensive scholarly inquiry and infrastructure.” – The New York Times

The sameness and lack of novelty in our Covid existence can negatively impact our creativity — our ability to put ideas together in new, useful combinations to solve problems. Creativity is often enhanced when we’re exposed to new situations. – Harvard Business Review

The Theory Wars, that is the administrative argument over which various strains of 20th-century continental European thought should play in the research and teaching of the humanities, has never exactly gone away, even while departments shutter and university work is farmed out to poorly-paid contingent faculty. – The Millions

“If you’re in a competitive district in a competitive election, the odds that your vote will flip a national election often fall between 1 in 1 million and 1 in 10 million. That’s a very small probability, but it’s big compared to your chances of winning the lottery, and it’s big relative to the enormous impact governments can have on the world.” – 80,000 Hours

The breadth of mental processes and behaviours for which stimulation has been argued to have an effect is quite staggering, including creativity, appetite, multitasking, memory, mind wandering, attention, motoric processes, sensory processing and theory of mind, to name but a few. – Psyche

Recently, Stephanie Lepp has been experimenting with a maligned technology, deepfakes, to create Deep Reckonings, a series of synthetic videos that imagine controversial public figures having a reckoning; in the deepfake footage, Alex Jones, Brett Kavanaugh, and Mark Zuckerberg reflect on the damage they have inflicted on society. – Forbes

“American thought has always tended to a certain solipsism, a trait that has become more prominent in recent times. If Fukuyama and his neoconservative allies believed the world was yearning to be remade on an imaginary American model, the woke movement believes “whiteness” accounts for all the evils of modern societies.” – New Statesman

Games, and their social context, are where many people shape their political ideas. And, of course, they’re where candidates go as well. “The presidential campaign for Joe Biden took the former vice president’s message to Animal Crossing, where players could visit a Biden HQ island. And on Oct. 19, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) proved to be an affable Twitch personality when she brought a low-key get-out-the-vote effort to indie game sensation Among Us.” – Los Angeles Times

Wallace Shawn: “America’s addiction to believing in its own goodness was quietly fading away, and the old words that President Kennedy used had become increasingly nauseating to a lot of people. People were not inspired, people were not breathing in self-esteem, when they heard the old phrases. And then Donald Trump came along and was elected, and he left that rhetoric far behind. He said goodbye to it.” – New York Review of Books

One huge bright spot, for example, is Soho Rep’s Project Number One, which puts artists on salary through June 2021. The artists in this program have been moved from a project-based, transactional relationship with the theatre to a more holistic, sustainable one. I believe this is an incredibly important, perhaps transformative, shift for our field to make. – HowlRound