Art and Culture

In 2003, older Americans read on average just under an hour each day — 58.5 minutes. By last year, that had fallen nearly by half, to roughly 32.4 minutes each day, a drop that represents the lion’s share of overall reading declines. …
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Brenda Fricker, who overcame a harrowing childhood to become the first Irish actress to win an Oscar, taking the prize for her turn as the unwavering mother of Daniel Day-Lewis’ character in My Left Foot, has died. She was 81.…
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One of the reasons TikTok’s book-review videos, known collectively as BookTok, have become so popular—and powerful in the publishing world—is that they offer a human-based, quasi-critical recommendation portal for fans and genre…
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The Federal Communications Commission signaled it will vote on Aug. 6 to repeal the longstanding cap on ownership of TV stations, replacing a limit that keeps owners from controlling stations in more than 39% of markets with a…
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Though Dmitriy Popov, now 20, was acquitted of murder, he was convicted of first-degree manslaughter as a hate crime and other charges for attacking Sibley — a Black and visibly gay man — with a knife and puncturing his heart while…
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I can see no reason in principle why interaction with AI could not offer practice that helps form good habits. But there is no guarantee that it will. A chatbot designed to gratify our egos will not help form the moral habits…
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Copyright is built on the idea that human creativity deserves protection. Legally, this is known as “originality”. The principle is simple: people create valuable cultural works and the law protects that effort. But artificial…
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While living on the English island of Jersey in the 1940s, a young queer French couple—Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore—performed a sly psyop on the Gestapo. They wrote notes taunting them to defect or commit sabotage and offering…
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The pedant quickly became one of the most popular caricatures on the stage. By 1600, almost fifty new plays featured a pedant — some by authors who, like Bibbiena, were not averse to a bit of playful satire and controversy: Pietro…
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When the 82-year-old psychologist Peter Gray describes the way he grew up, he punctuates the anecdotes by saying that modern parents would be arrested for letting a child have such fun. When he was 4 years old, he would walk to a store…
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