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Amussen, 33, is the editor of Burnaway, which focuses on criticism in the American South and often features young Black artists. (The magazine started in 2008 in response to layoffs at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s culture section and now runs as a nonprofit with four full-time employees and a budget that mostly consists of grants.)

Efforts to revive AICA-USA are continuing. In January, Jasmine Amussen joined the organization’s board to help rethink the meaning of criticism for a younger generation.

The organization has yearly dues of $115 and provides free access to many museums. But some members complained that the fee was too expensive for young critics, yet not enough to support significant programming.

The local radio jock said to me, “You must think all of this is pretty silly”. He motioned towards the crowd and then to a rollercoaster directly beside us that came screeching at our heads every 95 seconds. But I said, “No. In a century people are going to look back on right now as a sort of magic era, a charmed time of peace and prosperity and freedom from fear, as something that can never happen again, no matter how much they wish it would.”

telling the truth always liberates us, even if it scares the hell out of us simultaneously

Bad things have always happened in this world. That’s nothing new. And bad things will continue to have their uninterrupted run, right until the end of time.  But the “freedom from fear” Coupland speaks of is largely a function of not wallowing in it all the live-long day, which  our trusty bad-news delivery systems are pretty good about making us do. They give us the illusion of constant movement, even if our only destination is backwards, prompting us to forever double down on fear, and agitation, and mutual suspicion, while steeping us in our own soul sickness.

longer-term threats to democracy that are waiting around the corner. Perhaps the most serious is political artificial intelligence in the form of automated “chatbots,” which masquerade as humans and try to hijack the political process

Increasingly, they take the form of machine learning systems that are not painstakingly “taught” vocabulary, grammar and syntax but rather “learn” to respond appropriately using probabilistic inference from large data sets, together with some human guidance.

In the buildup to the midterms, for instance, an estimated 60 percent of the online chatter relating to “the caravan” of Central American migrants was initiated by chatbots.

the gods. They took their revenge by condemning Sisyphus to eternal torment in the underworld: He had to roll a huge boulder up a hill. When he reached the top, the stone would roll back down to the bottom, and he would have to start all over, on and on, forever.

One could even argue that all of life is Sisyphean: We eat to just get hungry again, and shower just to get dirty again, day after day, until the end.

Absurd, isn’t it? Albert Camus, the philosopher and father of a whole school of thought called absurdism, thought so. In his 1942 book The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus singles out Sisyphus as an icon of the absurd, noting that “his scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing.”

the deeper issue: How is it that we have morphed into a country where people claim endless “rights” while fewer and fewer believe they have any “responsibilities.”

That was really Young’s message for Rogan and Spotify: Sure, you have the right to spread anti-vaccine misinformation, but where’s your sense of responsibility to your fellow citizens, and especially to the nurses and doctors who have to deal with the fallout for your words?

“We are losing what could be called our societal immunity,” argued Dov Seidman, founder of the How Institute for Society. þff“Societal immunity is the capacity for people to come together, do hard things and look out for one another in the face of existential threats, like a pandemic, or serious challenges to the cornerstones of their political and economic systems, like the legitimacy of elections or peaceful transfer of power.”

According to “The Friendship Report,” a global study commissioned by Snapchat in 2019, the average age at which we meet our best friends is 21—a stage when we’re not only bonding over formative new experiences such as first love and first heartbreak, but also growing more discerning about whom we befriend.

young adulthood is a time when many of us have time.

it typically takes more than 200 hours, ideally over six weeks, for a stranger to grow into a close friend.

As animals, we are not physically well designed to sit at a desk for a minimum of 40 hours a week staring at screens. That so many of our waking hours are devoted to work in the first place is a very modern development that can easily erode our mental health and sense of self. We are a higher species capable of observing restraint, but we are also ambulatory clusters of needs and desires, with which evolution has both protected and sabotaged us.

Professional life, especially in a culture as work-obsessed as America’s, forces us into a lot of unnatural postures

it’s no surprise, when work occupies so much of our attention, that people sometimes find deep human connections there, even when they don’t intend to, and even when it’s inappropriate.

we fear that the most popular and fashionable strain of A.I. — machine learning — will degrade our science and debase our ethics by incorporating into our technology a fundamentally flawed conception of language and knowledge.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Sydney are marvels of machine learning. Roughly speaking, they take huge amounts of data, search for patterns in it and become increasingly proficient at generating statistically probable outputs — such as seemingly humanlike language and thought

if machine learning programs like ChatGPT continue to dominate the field of A.I

GPT-4, in contrast, is a state-of-the-art system capable of creating not just words but describing images in response to a person’s simple written commands.

When shown a photo of a boxing glove hanging over a wooden seesaw with a ball on one side, for instance, a person can ask what will happen if the glove drops, and GPT-4 will respond that it would hit the seesaw and cause the ball to fly up.

an AI program, known as a large language model, that early testers had claimed was remarkably advanced in its ability to reason and learn new things

The value of ChatGPT-like technology comes from bringing the cost of producing images, text and other creative projects close to zero

With only a few prompts, generative AI technology—such as the giant language models underlying the viral ChatGPT chatbot—can enable companies to create sales and marketing materials from scratch quickly for a fraction of the price of using current software tools, and paying designers, photographers and copywriters, among other expenses

“That’s very rare in my 20 years of experience in doing just frontier tech, to have four or five orders of magnitude of improvement on something people care about

It reminds me of how many people complain that they don’t see themselves in movies, books, etc. When I was growing up, I didn’t much, either, but I can’t say that it bothered me.

But what I enjoyed about TV was seeing something other than myself. I liked it as a window on the world, not as a look into my own life.

It was the same with books. The last thing I expected when growing up was to read about myself

if the point is simply pure destruction — building a chaos machine by removing a source of valuable information from our connected world, where groups of all stripes could communicate and organize, and replacing that with a place of parody that rewards insincerity, time-wasting and the worst forms of communication in order to degrade the better half — then he’s done a remarkable job in very short order. Truly it’s an amazing act of demolition. But, well, $44 billion can buy you a lot of wrecking balls.

That our system allows wealth to be turned into a weapon to nuke things of broad societal value is one hard lesson we should take away from the wreckage of downed turquoise feathers.

We should also consider how the ‘rules based order’ we’ve devised seems unable to stand up to a bully intent on replacing free access to information with paid disinformation — and how our democratic systems seem so incapable and frozen in the face of confident vandals running around spray-painting ‘freedom’ all over the walls as they burn the library down.

When we are herding, neuroimaging experiments show increased activation in the amygdala area of the brain, where fear and other negative emotions are processed. While you may feel vulnerable and exposed on your own, being part of the herd gives you a distinct sense of protection. You know in your guts that, in the midst of others, the risk of being hit by a car is lower because it is somehow distributed among the group’s members

The more of them, the lower the risk. There is safety in numbers. And so much more than mere safety.

Herding also comes with an intoxicating sense of power: as members of a crowd, we feel much stronger and braver than we are in fact.

Some might see the entrenchment of child-centeredness in children’s literature as reinforcing what some social critics consider a rising tide of narcissism in young people today. But to be fair: Such criticisms of youth transcend the ages.

What is certainly true now is the primacy of “mirrors and windows,” a philosophy that strives to show children characters who reflect how they look back to them, as well as those from different backgrounds, mostly with an eye to diversity.

This is a noble goal, but those mirrors and windows should apply to adults as well. Adults are, after all, central figures in children’s lives — their parents and caregivers, their teachers, their role models

by approaching universality, Instagram Face actually secured its role as an instrument of class distinction—a mark of a certain kind of woman. The women who don’t mind looking like others, or the conspicuousness of the work they’ve had done

Instagram Face goes with implants, middle-aged dates and nails too long to pick up the check. Batting false eyelashes, there in the restaurant it orders for dinner all the food groups of nouveau riche Dubai: caviar, truffle, fillers, foie gras, Botox, bottle service, bodycon silhouettes. The look, in that restaurant and everywhere, has reached a definite status. It’s the girlfriend, not the wife.

Does cosmetic work have a particular class? It has a price tag, which can amount to the same thing, unless that price drops low enough.

Did you hope to combine chemistry and political philosophy in some way in your medical career?

Chemistry requires synthetic thinking. You have to bring disparate pieces of knowledge together in order to look for a chemical structure. Political philosophy, to some degree, also involves disparate aspects of knowledge: economics, sociology, history, pure philosophy

I found that in medicine, you don’t have an answer when you start out. You’re looking for clues that are often distributed in different places: family history, as there might be a genetic predisposition; social history, because the person smoked or was exposed to a toxin; the physical examination, where you find that an organ might be disordered. Add to that the blood test, the CAT scan, all of it, but most importantly, the person, the psychology of the person you’re dealing with. It’s the same kind of synthetic process as political philosophy, but in a different dimension.

Incels (as they’re known) are infamous for sharing misogynistic attitudes and bitter hostility toward the romantically successful

somehow, incels’ hateful rhetoric has bizarrely become popularized via Gen Z slang.

it’s common to hear the suffix “pilled” as a funny way to say “convinced into a lifestyle.” Instead of “I now love eating burritos,” for instance, one might say, “I’m so burritopilled.” “Pilled” as a suffix comes from a scene in 1999’s “The Matrix” where Neo (Keanu Reeves) had to choose between the red pill and the blue pill, but the modern sense is formed through analogy with “blackpilled,” an online slang term meaning “accepting incel ideology.

Thousands of accounts examined by The Times offer disturbing insights into how social media is reshaping childhood, especially for girls, with direct parental encouragement and involvement.

Some parents are the driving force behind the sale of photos, exclusive chat sessions and even the girls’ worn leotards and cheer outfits to mostly unknown followers. The most devoted customers spend thousands of dollars nurturing the underage relationships.

The large audiences boosted by men can benefit the families, The Times found. The bigger followings look impressive to brands and bolster chances of getting discounts, products and other financial incentives, and the accounts themselves are rewarded by Instagram’s algorithm with greater visibility on the platform, which in turn attracts more followers.