culture

To me, what’s happening with teaching reading looks very much like what has happened with teaching writing, namely that we reduce something complex, human, and necessarily messy, to something smaller, discrete and oversimplified so it can be tested and measured, in order to provide comfort that we’re making “progress.”

We are courting a phenomenon... See more

The more upset I became, the more I felt that my sensitivity towards the paintings was the same sensitivity I held when I was the subject of the photographs. The uncomfortable, complex, and often difficult intimacy of the paintings characterizes their timeless humanity. The photograph of these paintings is just a collection of symbols, of words in... See more

In-spire: breathing in, breathing out, huffing from the sense that there is more to life than materialism (nihilistic metaphysics), utilitarianism (nihilistic ethics), and small-talk (nihilistic speech).

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.

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... See more