Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
The Quiet Ritual That Turns Out to Be Surprisingly Good for You Most people who sing alone do so carefully. In the car with the windows up. In the shower before anyone else is awake. At the stove, sof...
Read article →Reading vs Listening: What the Evidence Actually Resolves The audiobook has become a genuinely popular format, and with it has come a genuinely popular anxiety: does listening to a book count as reall...
Read article →The Comfort in Going Back There is a particular kind of reader who, when faced with a new stack of unread books, reaches instead for a worn paperback they have already read three times. Non-readers so...
Read article →Why That Song Won't Leave Your Head You're standing in line at the grocery store, and suddenly it's there again. The same eight bars, looping without your permission, demanding your mental real estate...
Read article →There is a specific line from a song I heard during one of the harder years of my life that still does something to me when it comes through whatever I am listening on. The line is not particularly im...
Read article →Why Book Clubs Create Bonds That Outlast the Books There is something that happens in long-running book clubs that goes well beyond discussing plot. Members who have met monthly for years will often s...
Read article →The Empathy Question: What Reading Fiction Does and Does Not Do The claim is appealing in its tidiness: reading literary fiction makes you more empathetic. It shows up in op-eds, in arguments for huma...
Read article →The question of whether to work in silence or to work with music playing has generated enough opinion and enough bad advice to fill several productivity books. The correct answer, frustratingly, is th...
Read article →There is a specific experience that most people recognize and almost no one can fully explain: you hear a song you have not thought about in years, and within a few seconds you are somewhere else. Not...
Read article →Stand in the crowd at a concert — a large one, the kind where the stage is too far away to see the performer's face clearly and you are experiencing the music primarily as vibration and collective sou...
Read article →The question is not difficult to pose: why do people listen to sad music when they are sad? It appears, at first glance, like a form of self-harm — choosing stimuli that will amplify or sustain a nega...
Read article →Music therapy has a branding problem. The phrase calls up images that range from the plausibly medical to the obviously implausible — hospital wards with harp players, wellness retreats with singing b...
Read article →I keep a running playlist called Slow Down that I have added to for about six years. It has Bon Iver and Nick Drake and a few things I am almost embarrassed to admit to. I put it on when I am moving t...
Read article →If you step back and think about it plainly, dystopian fiction asks readers to voluntarily inhabit futures where everything has gone wrong. The governments are authoritarian, the environment is ruined...
Read article →The first time I watched a film with subtitles and forgot I was reading them, something had shifted. The story was moving fast enough that the cognitive labor of the text disappeared, and I was simply...
Read article →The horror film audience is a specific kind of person: they pay to be scared, they seek out sensations that most self-preservation instincts would classify as threats, and they generally leave the the...
Read article →I have watched every season of a competitive cooking show that I will not name, and I can tell you the precise moment I felt genuinely worried about a contestant I had known for approximately forty mi...
Read article →There is a specific kind of evening that comfort show watchers know well. You are tired but not sleepy, a little wrung out from the day, and you queue up something you have already seen. Not something...
Read article →The sequence is familiar to anyone who has sat in a theater full of adults watching an animated film: a moment arrives, usually involving sacrifice or reunion or the particular ache of time passing, a...
Read article →When people describe a relationship as "straight out of a rom-com," they usually mean it as a compliment. They mean there was a grand gesture, or a misunderstanding that almost destroyed everything be...
Read article →The first time I realized I genuinely missed a fictional character, I was standing in a grocery store parking lot, listening to a podcast recap of a show I had just finished. The host said something l...
Read article →You tell yourself one more episode. You have said this before. It is 11:47 PM and you are not even enjoying it anymore — you are enduring it, pushing forward through plot like clearing a path. And yet...
Read article →I have watched Breaking Bad twice, and both times I found myself hoping Walter White would get away with it. Not because I think methamphetamine distribution is good, and not because I had lost track...
Read article →There is a persistent and damaging assumption embedded in how most organizations think about professional development: that learning peaks in your twenties and early thirties, and that investing in em...
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