Jenna Guarascio

Nadia Asparouhova's book about antimemetics helps explain why we're stuck in these destructive loops. Antimemes are high-impact, low-transmissibility ideas. Compared to traditional memes, they are hard to spread because they're complex, counterintuitive, or culturally taboo.

The attention economy is hostile to antimeme development. It rewards ideas... See more

we both love Mavis Gallant, for example, and other fiction writers who write with Gallant’s precision, insight, sense of perspective on life and its vagaries.

The question is no longer " what can AI do?" but " what’s left of us once it does?

That’s the real issue, I think. We want the good part without the process. We want the quiet, layered life without going through the messiness of building it. But the messiness is where life actually happens.

The idea of research as leisure activity has stayed with me because it seems to describe a kind of intellectual inquiry that comes from idiosyncratic passion and interest. It’s not about the formal credentials. It’s fundamentally about play . It seems to describe a life where it’s just fun to be reading, learning, writing, and collaborating on... See more

If anthropology proved less than revelatory in that case, or rather if what it revealed was only that globalization and technology have made ways of being across cultures increasingly generic, the discipline has equipped Asya with a way to organize her thoughts about the world, which, we learn, has long been useful in making sense of a life without... See more