TagCulture
The Absurdity of Our Media Moment
When crimes seem almost scripted to stoke division and speculation
Scott Galloway: Get Men Off the Screens
The conversation revolved around one big question: What happened to men?
In Memoriam: Two Prophets and a President Died This Day
The prophetic artists of the past still speak
Why Do We Have So Many Live-Action Remakes?
Whether a cartoon or live-action, what we really want is a good storyA couple of days ago, I chanced upon a trailer for the live-action version of How to Train Your Dragon. The original film, based on the book of the same name, premiered in 2010 and follows the heartfelt adventure story of a young Nordic lad, Hiccup, and his friendly dragon Toothless (who does, in fact, have teeth). The original movie got great reviews and remains one of my personal favorite animated films. It has memorable and funny characters, a good storyline, and is well animated. So why do we need a live-action version of the movie? A Loss of Originality Disney led the charge with its realistic remakes with live-action representations of Beauty and the Beast, Lion King, and Cinderella, Read More ›
David Foster Wallace’s American Dream
We don’t need a grand revolution to achieve something meaningful — living a compassionate life is as American as it gets.In 2005, writer David Foster Wallace captured the ethos of a fragile America while talking to college students. The speech warrants rereading today, given the current state of free speech and thought on college campuses nationwide. Wallace delivered This is Water as a commencement speech to Kenyon College seniors seeking to inspire the next generation of thinkers, builders, and servers. It tackled cynicism and forgiveness through simple examples, like swimming fish. Yet, its enduring spirit lies in how perfectly Wallace addresses the American identity crisis. In his words, “the really significant education… isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.” Wallace’s advice is a rebuke against selfishness. The ability to think is useless if you refuse to learn Read More ›
Smartphone: The “Experience Blocker”
Experience is the key to emotional development and a fully human lifeSmartphones are distracting and addicting, but according to Jonathan Haidt, and supported by our common experience, they can also keep us from a basic ingredient of human life: Experience. Sometimes I wonder if the worst aspect of the “dopamine culture,” as culture critic Ted Gioia calls it, is not that we no longer have the attention spans to focus on our work, but that we no longer seem able to enjoy activities that aren’t based on screens. Simple pleasures like a good meal, meant to savor and digest at a slow pace, or going through a rich and complicated novel that yields real insight and literary joy, or even kissing an actual person in an affectionate way are all “old-school” Read More ›
Coldplay’s “Moon Music” is a Beautiful Leap for the Heavens
An album of energy and hope for a time of strain and pain
Sam Altman Was on My Favorite Writing Podcast. His View on Storytelling Surprised Me.
When we read, we want to hear from a human about what it means to be human.Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has garnered a fair share of criticism from the writing crowd for creating ChatGPT, a tool that on the surface seems to banish the need for human writers at all. However, Altman recently appeared on David Perell’s prominent writing podcast “How I Write” to talk about his own writing process, AI, and what he uses ChatGPT for. Altman and Perell talk about the importance of language for human communication, with Altman noting how he can’t imagine human life without language. AI, Altman says, is supposed to make language and the writing process “better.” In his view, that’s what computers have also sought to do: Create opportunities for humans to expand and deepen their capacities. But Read More ›
Musk Wants to Use AI to Understand the Universe. Will it Work?
Could AI ever aid our quest to fully understand the universe?Jordan Peterson and Elon Musk sat down this week for an extensive conversation ranging from technology, AI, politics, and even religion and questions of the metaphysical. These two prominent figures are active on Musk’s X, and frequently call out infringements on free speech and other authoritarian measures they see as a danger. In one interesting point in the interview, Musk described how he diverged in his views from his friend Larry Page on AI safety. Page evidently believes that we will “upload our minds to the computer,” to which Peterson said, “There’s not much difference between that and the death of humanity.” Musk nonetheless is the developer of his own AI system and believes that AI can aid humanity’s perennial Read More ›
Coldplay, Pop Music, and AI Mimicry
Musicians are being pressured into the pop music maniaColdplay is my favorite band. Some make fun of me for this, but their discography, ranging from the raw immediacy of Rush of Blood to the Head (2002) to the synthetic coldness of Ghost Stories (2014) is too wide ranging, beautifully rendered, and personally resonant for me to dismiss. That said, something’s happened to the music industry that has even alt-rockers in its grip, including Coldplay. The super-band’s latest single, “feelslikeimfallinginlove,” is a far cry from their roots. While some bands maturate with age, Coldplay has simplified and infantilized; frontman Chris Martin was writing much more interesting, compelling lyrics at age twenty-five than forty-five. The new single is a simple pop song, youthful, exuberant, without much musical complexity or the Read More ›
AI Is Going to Do the Dating for You
Making dating "easier" with AI might actually end up making it a lot harder.
The Uniqueness of the Human Writer
LLMs are shortcuts, but sometimes the shortcut makes you miss the point of the journey
Remote Work: Liberation or a Major Step Back?
Feeling disconnected or undervalued can lead to quiet quitting, data showsArticles and studies abound on the viability of remote work, particularly following the mass transformation of the white-collar workplace after 2020. While millennials and Gen-Z workers, fresh out of college, fled metro areas and moved online, whole office spaces found themselves empty. Office real estate workers continue to struggle leasing out their spaces to businesses, since so many employers now have a remote or hybrid work schedule. It is difficult to reach a conclusive stance on the pros and cons of remote work by reading the dozens of articles on the topic. Opinions vary so widely. Some praise the new shift towards remote work as a revolutionary step in the workforce. Others note that remote work is actually a step Read More ›
Escaping the Dopamine Cartel
We can't even be bothered with "entertainment" anymore.
Alien Review, Part 2
Herding aliens in space is a bad ideaRead Part 1 of this review first if you missed it: Alien Review, Part 1 | Mind Matters In the previous review, we began discussing the sci-fi classic, Alien, and we left off with one of the Nostromo’s crewmembers, Kane, waking up after being attacked by a strange creature which had essentially glued itself to his face. Now, the creature is dead, and all seems well. Since Kane appears to be alright, and the crew begins eating another meal, preparing to renter cryosleep for their return journey to Earth. But as they are eating, Kane begins to scream in pain. The other’s try to help him, but they have no idea what’s going on. Finally, another alien explodes from Kane’s Read More ›
Planet of the Apes and Human Exceptionalism
This movie franchise makes us wonder what makes human beings unique.One semi-random movie franchise I’ve been a massive fan of is the newest iteration of The Planet of the Apes. The original trilogy, directed by Matt Reeves (The Batman) concluded in 2017, but a “fourth” film is set to release on Memorial Day of 2024, and a trailer for it dropped this week. I’m starting to become somewhat “anti-trailer” given that more often than not they tend to either distort the hype of the film or give away the story entirely. But in the cases of movies I’m most excited about, I confess that generally I give the trailer a quick view. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is set years after Caesar, the founder of the ape colony Read More ›
Israel, Free Will, and the Problem of Evil
If determinism is true, then we have no free will. We are nothing more than meat machines.The events of the past week in Israel have left the civilized world reeling. Hamas has killed more than 1,200 Jewish innocents in the most violent eruption of anti-Semitism since the Holocaust, and it seems likely a war will follow that will soon kill thousands more innocent people. As we ponder and pray over this mass slaughter, it is worthwhile to reflect for a moment on what these events tell us about the ideological and scientific dogmas of the 21st century — about atheism, determinism and Darwinism. Are these dogmas true, and do they provide a meaningful understanding of man and of moral action? If atheism is true and there is no God, there is no Moral Lawgiver. The concept of Read More ›
Arrival Review, Part 1
Nobody behaves like they should for the first ten minutes. They act, dare I say, alien.Arrival is an interesting movie. It’s well-shot, well-acted, and well-written. The trouble is the script makes some strange choices in the beginning and I just wasn’t persuaded by the movie’s twist at the end. The story starts out with a montage where Louise is raising her daughter, but the child tragically dies of some unknown illness, presumably cancer. The viewer is led to conclude that this is a flashback, but if one listens to the monologue Louise delivers, she says plainly that she’s explaining when the child’s story begins, if there are beginning at all, which is something she no longer believes. This basically means that the entire movie is a flashback, but the viewer is not supposed to notice Read More ›
Oliver Anthony, Music, and Human Exceptionalism
Honest music speaks to the heart and brings us closer together.If you’ve been online at all for the last few weeks, chances are you’ve come across headlines about the folk/country singer Oliver Anthony, whose song “Rich Men North of Richmond” went viral in August. The song, a broad critique of elite power in Washington D.C., (Democrat and Republican) has gained both applause and fierce critique, but for the most part, seems to have deeply resonated with the general American public. Psychologist Jordan B. Peterson recently had Anthony on his podcast, discussing music, entrepreneurship, and virality. One thing is clear about Anthony’s songs: they’re honest, and people are attracted to that. Peterson noted in their conversation that authenticity is a sign of brilliance in artists, and how that sort of honesty Read More ›