Category: ideas

Inside The Burgeoning Seduction Industry

Commonly known as ‘pickup’ or ‘game’, the seduction industry first took shape in the United States in the early 2000s. What began as a few online forums and meetup groups soon gave rise to commercial products and services. Some of those with a personal interest in seduction began to style themselves as professionals, offering practical training and personal development for heterosexual men who wanted greater choice and control in their intimate lives. – Aeon

Cities Of War (An Urban Plan)

“Urbicide is the targeted destruction of cities as a tactic of war. The violence chronicled here is not aerial annihilation—hospitals and homes reduced to rubble—but the “gradual construction of buildings and infrastructure” in ways that collapse boundaries between war and peace, militarizing everyday life.  – Public Books

The Huge Ethical Issues Around Artificial Intelligence

“Ethical concerns about these advances focus at one extreme on the use of AI in deadly military drones, or on the risk that AI could take down global financial systems. Closer to home, AI has spurred anxiety about unemployment, as autonomous systems threaten to replace millions of truck drivers, and make Lyft and Uber obsolete. And beyond these larger social and economic considerations, data scientists have real concerns about bias, about ethical implementations of the technology, and about the nature of interactions between AI systems and humans if these systems are to be deployed properly and fairly in even the most mundane applications.” — Harvard Magazine

“Jazz Is Dying” As Metaphor For The Larger Culture

Matthew McKnight examines Jazz At Lincoln Center: “While the obituary writers may have been right—something’s dying—they have been preoccupied with the wrong thing. By looking for signs of vitality in measures of jazz’s popularity, it becomes easier to ignore what the music, according to Marsalis’s definition, is: a refinement of empathic listening, a model for improvisation, and an embodiment of meaningful time perception. If this is right, then the supposition that jazz is dead carries meaning beyond itself. What if we are witnessing the death, or suffocation, of a society that values careful listening, serendipity and, like a jazz ensemble, the dedication to finding common ground?” – The Point