Category: ideas

Despite ample evidence to the contrary, many people remain stubbornly inclined to believe that great artists like Levine are somehow immune to the temptation to conduct themselves contemptibly. So it will be interesting to see what happens when the attention of the public turns, as it undoubtedly will, to the misconduct of still greater artists of the past.

Héctor Tobar: “We need to bring the ambitions, the foibles and the soul of immigrant America into the collective American mind. And for that we need television shows and movies, and more novels, poems, paintings and songs. High art and low. We need stories told in Spanglish and Korean slang, and erudite English, and in bright and moody colors by artists who represent the sons and daughters of the African, Latino and Asian diasporas.”

VocaliD’s technology works by capturing a few seconds of vowel sound (the source) from the recipient, and applying it to the filter provided by a donor. The combination allows the production of a voice that’s largely “of” the recipient.

In old folktales, no one fights for values. Individual stories might show the virtues of honesty or hospitality, but there’s no agreement among folktales about which actions are good or bad. When characters get their comeuppance for disobeying advice, for example, there is likely another similar story in which the protagonist survives only because he disobeys advice. Defending a consistent set of values is so central to the logic of newer plots that the stories themselves are often reshaped to create values for characters such as Thor and Loki – who in the 16th-century Icelandic Eddahad personalities rather than consistent moral orientations.

“Instead of framing space as a relationship between objects and walls, the Japanese concept of space is about the relationships among people. By shifting this view, we can discover an interesting way of thinking about the spaces we make and use in everyday life—and the relationships that they create.”

It turned out that, when they were swearing, the intrepid volunteers could keep their hands in the water nearly 50 percent longer as when they used their non-cursing, table-based adjectives. Not only that, while they were swearing the volunteers’ heart rates went up and their perception of pain went down. In other words, the volunteers experienced less pain while swearing. It’s an easy experiment to try for yourself at home, or at a party if you have the right kind of friends.

“The basic idea is that gender is created by the very words and actions that appear, superficially, to be simply describing it after the fact. … Gender is not a thing so much as a process by which patterns of language and action come to repeat themselves.” Will Fraker unpacks Judith Butler’s most famous idea.

“The dichotomy between good attention and bad distraction is so fundamental that it is written into the very language we use to talk about attending. Consider the phrase “I pay attention.” It implies that attention is valuable, a type of currency we deliberately and consciously invest in. When I pay attention, I am in control of my action, and I am aware of its value. Now compare this with the phrase “I am distracted.” Suddenly we are dealing with a passive and vulnerable subject who suffers an experience without doing much to contribute to it.”