If you’ve been enjoying these curated article summaries that dive into cultural, creative, and technological currents, you may find the discussions and analyses on our Substack page worthwhile as well. There, I explore themes and ideas that often intersect with the subjects covered in the articles I come across during my curation process.
While this curation simply aims to surface compelling pieces, our Substack writings delve deeper into topics that have piqued our curiosity over time. From examining the manifestation of language shaping our reality to unpacking philosophical undercurrents in society, our Substack serves as an outlet to unpack our perspectives on the notable trends and undercurrents reflected in these curated readings.
So if any of the articles here have stoked your intellectual interests, I invite you to carry that engagement over to our Substack, where we discuss related matters in more depth. Consider it an extension of the curation – a space to further engage with the fascinating ideas these pieces have surfaced.
In 1953, Roald Dahl published “The Great Automatic Grammatizator,” a short story about an electrical engineer who secretly desires to be a writer. One day, after completing construction of the world’s fastest calculating machine, the engineer realizes that “English grammar is governed by rules that are almost mathematical in their strictness.” He constructs a fiction-writing machine that can produce a five-thousand-word short story in thirty seconds; a novel takes fifteen minutes and requires the operator to manipulate handles and foot pedals, as if he were driving a car or playing an organ, to regulate the levels of humor and pathos. The resulting novels are so popular that, within a year, half the fiction published in English is a product of the engineer’s invention.
Is there anything about art that makes us think it can’t be created by pushing a button, as in Dahl’s imagination? Right now, the fiction generated by large language models like ChatGPT is terrible, but one can imagine that such programs might improve in the future. How good could they get? Could they get better than humans at writing fiction—or making paintings or movies—in the same way that calculators are better at addition and subtraction?
Art is notoriously hard to define, and so are the differences between good art and bad art. But let me offer a generalization: art is something that results from making a lot of choices. This might be easiest to explain if we use fiction writing as an example. When you are writing fiction, you are—consciously or unconsciously—making a choice about almost every word you type; to oversimplify, we can imagine that a ten-thousand-word short story requires something on the order of ten thousand choices. When you give a generative-A.I. program a prompt, you are making very few choices; if you supply a hundred-word prompt, you have made on the order of a hundred choices.
If an A.I. generates a ten-thousand-word story based on your prompt, it has to fill in for all of the choices that you are not making. There are various ways it can do this. One is to take an average of the choices that other writers have made, as represented by text found on the Internet; that average is equivalent to the least interesting choices possible, which is why A.I.-generated text is often really bland. Another is to instruct the program to engage in style mimicry, emulating the choices made by a specific writer, which produces a highly derivative story. In neither case is it creating interesting art.
Read the rest of this article at: The New Yorker
What if I told you that one age group is more depressed, more anxious, and lonelier than any other in America?
You might assume I’m talking about teens. Mood disorders, self-harm, and suicide have become more common among adolescents in recent years; article after article reports that social media is toxic for teen girls especially, eroding their self-esteem and leaving them disconnected. Or you might think of older adults, often depicted in popular culture and news commentary as isolated and unhappy, their health declining and their friends dropping away.
So perhaps you’d be surprised to hear the results of a Harvard Graduate School of Education survey on mental health in America: Young adults are the ones most in crisis. Even Richard Weissbourd, who led the study in 2022, was taken aback. His team found that 36 percent of participants ages 18 to 25 reported experiencing anxiety and 29 percent reported experiencing depression—about double the proportion of 14-to-17-year-olds on each measure. More than half of young adults were worried about money, felt that the pressure to achieve hurt their mental health, and believed that their lives lacked meaning or purpose. Teenagers and senior citizens are actually the two populations with the lowest levels of anxiety and depression, Weissbourd’s research has found.
Other studies of young adults have similarly alarming findings. According to the CDC, in 2020, depression was most prevalent among 18-to-24-year-olds (and least prevalent among those 65 or older). A 2023 Gallup poll found that loneliness peaked at ages 18 to 29. And, according to one meta-analysis spanning four decades, more and more young adults reported loneliness each year. When Weissbourd repeated his survey last year, young-adult anxiety and depression had also risen, to 54 and 42 percent, respectively. Still, the struggles of young adults have gone widely unnoticed. When Weissbourd got his data, “it was really upsetting,” he told me. “What is going on here? And why aren’t we talking about it more?”
Read the rest of this article at: The Atlantic
What were you doing in the summer of 2009? Appraising Bradley Cooper’s comedic chops in The Hangover? Wondering if Obama could really get it together to pass a health-care bill? Collecting unemployment thanks to that pesky global recession? Look, the point is it was a long time ago. And that summer was also the last time a male American tennis player made it to a major championship final, when Andy Roddick lost in excruciating fashion to Roger Federer at Wimbledon. Since then, American women have made it to 29 finals and won 15 of them, 12 courtesy of Serena Williams. American men have largely been impotent at the big tournaments during that span. It’s been a far cry from the Pete Sampras– and Andre Agassi–dominated ’90s — or really from the rest of tennis history, which is replete with star-spangled men’s greats from Bill Tilden to Jimmy Connors.
This once-unimaginable losing streak will finally end on Sunday, when either Taylor Fritz or Frances Tiafoe enter Arthur Ashe Stadium with an opportunity to win one of the more topsy-turvy major tournaments in recent memory; the two go toe to toe in the semifinals on Friday for a spot in the final. On Tuesday, Fritz, who has been playing the tennis of his life, dispatched Germany’s morally dubious Alexander Zverev in a steely four-set quarterfinals performance. Later, Frances Tiafoe, who has rebounded in earnest at the Open after rough spring and summer, took out Grigor Dimitrov in a somewhat less steely performance — but a W’s a W.
Read the rest of this article at: New York Magazine
Television’s best jokes turn hierarchies upside-down. In some cases ghoulish beauty standards are treated as ordinary, like when Morticia Addams clips the heads off roses to display the thorny stems, or when comely Marilyn Munster feels like the outcast in a family of vampires and Frankensteins. In others an authority figure gets taken for a perp or lowlife. Consider Peter Falk’s Lieutenant Columbo, the disheveled detective who spent much of the 1970s as the tentpole of NBC’s prime-time mystery programming block. Throughout the series he finds himself mistaken for various riffraff. At a soup kitchen where he’s collecting testimony, an overzealous nun assumes he’s without a home and needs a meal; at a porno shop where he’s following up on a clue, a customer takes him for a fellow pervert; at a crime scene, a policeman dismisses him as a rubberneck until he bashfully admits to being the investigating officer.
It’s an easy mistake to make. Columbo expects to be underestimated. In fact he’s counting on it. He always wears an earth-tone, threadbare raincoat, unless it’s raining. (Falk requested that the detective’s costume be made to look more Italian: “Everything is brown there, including the buildings. The Italians really understand that color best.”) He treats murder scenes in a decidedly unhygienic way, dropping cigar ashes all over the premises and indelicately touching the corpse. He veils his intelligence in a fog of stagy absentmindedness: his famous catchphrase, before clinching the case, is “Just one more thing.” Columbo is, in the words of one criminal, “a sly little elf [who] should be sitting under your own private little toadstool.” Elaine May reportedly called him “an ass-backward Sherlock Holmes.”
Read the rest of this article at: The New York Review
With a name that sounds like something a parent would slowly mouth to their infant, NaNoWriMo is an annual “challenge” in which many thousands of seemingly well-adjusted people decide to write a novel in a month. “Do I need something special to write a novel?” the nonprofit that puts on this exquisite torture reasonably asks on its website. “Nope!”
National Novel Writing Month began in 1999 with 21 participants, and now nearly half a million take part every November. The event is also the name of the organization that gamifies the exercise, hosting participants on its online platform. To “win” NaNoWriMo, you need to produce a minimum of 50,000 words in a month (about the length of The Great Gatsby)—or 1,667 words a day, a number, NaNoWriMo tells us, that “scientists have determined to be the perfect amount to boost your creativity.”
NaNoWriMo first emerged in the San Francisco Bay Area, and it has Silicon Valley’s fingerprints all over it; if you’ve ever thought that producing fiction could be optimized, this is like the Soylent of novel writing. The organization boasts that its platform “tracks words for writers like Fitbit tracks steps.” But as long as it involved humans actually sitting down and sweating out sentences, it all seemed pretty harmless to someone like me, a curmudgeon who thinks writing is just hard work and not for everyone. But on Monday, NaNoWriMo expressed its thoughts on the use of AI, and it turns out that being a human is no longer even a requirement.
And now I think I know where NaNoWriMo is headed, and I approve: Just let the robots do it.
Read the rest of this article at: The Atlantic
