The public library is the most democratic of public services. Nobody will ask you what you’re doing there. By being there, you belong.
Texas Libraries Are Engines of Optimism by Elizabeth McCracken in Texas Highways
I get my ideas from a wide catalog of experience with a variety of media, life experiences and a brain that craves experiences that subvert and trust the audience.
A Video Game Dynamo With Strange Ideas Always Swirling by Harold Goldberg in The New York Times
This is not literature as “entertainment,” no. It’s literature as propaganda.The story’s foregrounding of LLMs as narrator and main character, its framing of both as alienated workers mourning the absence of something they can’t even name, and its depiction of writing itself as more or less Sisyphean labor all serve to discursively construct LLMs as comrades to suffering humans. By extension, the human condition is cast as a generic, apolitical state of abstracted loneliness and confusion cut through by the occasional moment of similarly nondescript wonder.
Literature Is Not a Vibe: On ChatGPT and the Humanities by Rachele Dini in the LA Review of Books
My rules: No news, no social media, no podcasts, no music. No “teleporting,” you could say. The phone, the great teleportation device, the great murderer of boredom. And yet, boredom: the great engine of creativity. I now believe with all my heart that it’s only in the crushing silences of boredom—without all that black-mirror dopamine — that you can access your deepest creative wells.
Craig Mod on the Creative Power of Walking in Literary Hub
At different junctures, my siblings and I all tried public school, curious to know how our peers lived. I briefly went to fourth grade, for example, where the trifling emotions associated with immaturity—greed, envy, fear, conformity—overpowered the inspiring and desirable attributes of childhood: compassion, curiosity, imagination, playfulness.
The Unschooled Life: Astra Taylor's Story byy Sarahana Shrestha in PopularResistance.org
And by “great criticism,” he (Jacob Geller) means writing that goes beyond box-ticking, that understands video games as experiences and not fixed products.
Even When You’re Not Playing, You’re Playing: On “Critical Hits” by Mason Andrew Hamberlin in the Cleveland Review of Books
Today's artificial intelligence is a tool for generating new numbers from patterns in massive piles of old numbers. Given the recent ebullience around AI, it's important not to lose sight of this. These tools are no doubt dazzling, but they are essentially next-word predictors, or next-pixel predictors.
The Desire Called Synthesis by Alexander R. Galloway
While Arabfuturism cannot be pinned down to a concrete definition – intentionally so – vague science-fiction aesthetic descriptions are associated with it as well as a vehement rejection of our quotidian, everyday understanding of temporality.
Arabfuturism: Science-Fiction & Alternate Realities in the Arab World by Perwana Nazif in The Quietus
I always have the feeling I need to store things so that I never forget them. I might record it in a book with a Post-it note, but I might not revisit that book for 10 years. Then I pull it off the shelf and I think, “Oh god, I remember that. That’s why I put the Post-it note there,” and then I’ll use it. So I have mental storage in my head at all times.
Meet Angela Hill, the Photographer Behind the World's Coolest Bookshop by Leila Eden Sheridan in Interview