culture

The simulacrum is never what hides the truth-it is truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true.

A reading revolution is taking place on this notorious message board, most famous for alt-right memes, anything-goes chatter, and large-scale coordinated pranks (several hoax bomb threats organised by the site have led to arrests and mass evacuations). Users operate under total anonymity and are subject to bare-bones moderation. Most of the ideolog... See more

The inhabitants of /lit/ see themselves as the victim of anti-canon efforts, as the academy has sought to “decolonise” and expand the curriculum over the past decade. And /lit/’s reaction is hardly unreasonable: there’s a difference between great books (well-written, perhaps undiscovered) and Great Books, which stay in the accepted canon because th... See more

And the hyper-efficient assembly-line techniques that characterised ‘megalithic’ Hollywood filmmaking from the 1910s onward began to corrode as early as 1948, when an antitrust lawsuit successfully forbade the major studios from owning their own cinemas and crowding them with their own relatively low-cost films.

We can’t address the decline in empathy without addressing the decline in attention . Empathy requires a degree of sustained focus:

• Paying attention to an experience someone is sharing


• Recalling experiencing a similar emotional response


• Sitting with your own and the other person’s inner state

When we are fragmented and distracted , we simply can’t com... See more

It’s hard to talk about “masterpieces” because the concept trades on a theory of aesthetics that is controversial when spelled out (aesthetic value realism; maybe even a kind of Platonism about beauty) and difficult to defend, but which we all nevertheless subscribe to intuitively.

But this isn’t about phone numbers or navigation. It’s about how technology clearly changes our minds. And there is a risk that today’s siphoning of young brains into phones and laptops isn’t just happening with maps and digits, but with critical thinking and complex language.

Artificial intelligence is already killing off important parts of the human experience. But one of its most consequential murders—so far—is the demise of a longstanding rite of passage for students worldwide: an attempt to synthesize complex information and condense it into compelling analytical prose. It’s a training ground for the most quintessen... See more

The writing is getting better. The ideas are getting worse. There’s a new genre of essay that other academics reading this will instantly recognize, a clumsy collaboration between students and Silicon Valley. I call it glittering sludge .