Flaubert despised the middle-class desire to confirm moral lessons and comfortable truths in its entertainments; he is also very broadly disliked by the sorts of readers who go looking for such things
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A little more than a year ago, Elon Musk began his reign at Twitter with an elaborately staged pun. On Wednesday, October 26, 2022, he posted a tweet with a video that showed him carrying a sink through the lobby of the company’s San Francisco headquarters. “Entering Twitter HQ—let that sink in!” he wrote.
The millennial internet first died in 2015. I remember the day exactly because I was one of seven staffers, in addition to many more permalancers, at Gawker Media who were laid off as part of a company-wide restructuring. I received a message on Slack, was asked to join a meeting in a nearby conference room...
Cultural upheavals can be a riddle in real time. Trends that might seem obvious in hindsight are poorly understood in the present or not fathomed at all. We live in turbulent times now, at the tail end of a pandemic that killed millions and, for a period, reordered existence as we knew it. It marked, perhaps more than any other crisis in modern times, a new era, the world of the 2010s wrenched away for good.
IBM is one of the oldest technology companies in the world, with a raft of innovations to its credit, including mainframe computing, computer-programming languages, and AI-powered tools. But ask an ordinary person under the age of 40 what exactly IBM does (or did), and the responses will be vague at best.
Since the term nostalgia first became common currency, no area of life has been associated with it more than popular culture. From Alvin Toffler onward, intellectuals frequently drew on revivals of past styles in music and fashion or used films and television series set in the past as examples to substantiate their claims that nostalgia had become omnipresent.
Here is a very dumb truth: for a decade, the default answer to nearly every problem in mass media communication involved Twitter. Breaking news? Twitter. Live sports commentary? Twitter. Politics? Twitter. A celebrity has behaved badly? Twitter. A celebrity has issued a Notes app apology for bad behavior? Twitter. For a good while, the most reliable way to find out what a loud noise in New York City was involved asking Twitter. Was there an earthquake in San Francisco? Twitter. Is some website down? Twitter.
A little more than a year ago, the world seemed to wake up to the promise and dangers of artificial intelligence when OpenAI released ChatGPT, an application that enables users to converse with a computer in a singularly human way.
Many academic fields can be said to ‘study morality’. Of these, the philosophical sub-discipline of normative ethics studies morality in what is arguably the least alienated way. Rather than focusing on how people and societies think and talk about morality, normative ethicists try to figure out which things are, simply, morally good or bad, and why.
At this point, it doesn’t matter how Napoleon does. Critics might love it or critics might hate it. It might crater at the box office, or it might single-handedly resuscitate the theatrical viewing experience.
Twenty-five years ago, the burgeoning science of consciousness studies was rife with promise. With cutting-edge neuroimaging tools leading to new research programmes, the neuroscientist Christof Koch was so optimistic, he bet a case of wine that we’d uncover its secrets by now.
“It turns out that I’m young, and I have a whole life of shit I can do,” she says. “Maybe because my life became so adult very young, I forgot that I was still that young. I settled in a lot of ways: I lived my life as if I were in my 70s. I realized recently that I don’t need to do that.”
The myth of The Writer looms large in our cultural consciousness. When most readers picture an author, they imagine an astigmatic, scholarly type who wakes at the crack of dawn in a monastic, book-filled, shockingly affordable house surrounded by nature.
A golden age of connectivity is ending. “I deleted my Facebook years ago, spend at least three to six months off Twitter every year, and Bluesky invites are just sitting in my inbox,” a friend tells me when I ask how her relationship to social media has changed in recent times.
Wherever this story takes you—thoughts on marriage, on food, on work, on the rise and fall of the American century, on your own life and time’s passage through it—I invite you to picture Loukas first.
