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.
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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.
Travel and history can both inspire a sense of moral relativism, as they did for the Greek historian and traveller Herodotus in the 5th century BCE. What should one make of the fact that what counts as adultery, for example, differs around the world?
A few years ago, advertisements for a software service named Monday.com seemed to be suddenly everywhere online. This ubiquity didn’t come cheap. An S.E.C. filing revealed that the product’s developers had spent close to a hundred and thirty million dollars on advertising in 2020 alone, which amounted to roughly eighty per cent of the company’s annual revenue.
In 1925, a new, highly desirable trait was invented. Press reports hailed a new Hollywood star: Count Ludwig von Salm-Hoogstraeten, an Austrian noble and tennis champion, who was rumored to be appearing in a film from the megaproducer Samuel Goldwyn.
“They were the new Charles and Diana, in some ways,” Gary Neville, the former Manchester United player, says in the first episode of “Beckham,” a new, four-part documentary on Netflix. They, of course, are David Beckham, Neville’s friend and onetime teammate, and Beckham’s then girlfriend, Victoria Adams, a.k.a. Posh Spice.