What Virtual Reality Might Do To Our Nervous Systems

Vision has a general advantage, in humans, over touch, so the virtual reality environment should be OK. And yet! “Touch is the fact-checking sense. … Touching is more psychologically reassuring than seeing. Touch does not always make us experience things better, but it certainly makes us feel better about what we experience. Even when we can see that the keys are in our bags, we are much more certain that they are once we’ve touched them.”

Perhaps Humans Aren’t ‘Naturally Good’ At All

To Philippa Foot, one of the marvelous generation of British philosophers that also included Iris Murdoch, that seemed almost clear after WWII. “What would a moral philosophy look like if it started from a darker picture of human beings as not, basically, ‘decent chaps’? Part of what animated Foot and her allies was a conviction that the answer to such a question would not be easy or self-contained, would not be the sort of logical proof one could polish off in a few weeks.”

Sydney Morning Herald Theatre Critic Fired After Launching New Arts Website

Jason Blake, chief theatre critic for the Herald since 2010, and his wife Elissa, a freelance arts journalist for that paper and its Sunday tabloid, The Sun-Herald, opened the Sydney-focused website Audrey Journal in November to help make up for reduced arts coverage in the print newspapers. Now the SMH has told the Blakes that their new venture, which is supported financially by several Sydney arts institutions, is a conflict of interest.

Brazil’s Famous Hotbed Of Countercultural Theatre Now Under Threat By Real Estate Development

Teatro Oficina, part of the tropicalismo movement of the 1960s and ’70s and notorious for performances filled with nudity and onstage drug consumption, is headquartered in a unique, landmarked São Paulo building by architect Lina Bo Bardi with a huge window and retractable ceiling. Mogul and TV personality Silvio Santos owns the land around Teatro Oficina and wants to build three skyscrapers which would block the theatre’s light, and the country’s artistic community is rallying to fight Santos’s plan.