Happy Friday,
Here are five things I thought worth sharing this week.
How did so much Renaissance art end up in American collections and museums?
The Convivial Society on our modern “failure to stock our heart, mind, and imagination.” Given that writing allows us to externalize memory and recollect things, rather than relying exclusively on memory, and given that LLMs present the opportunity to improve our articulation of such externalized memory, perhaps the opportunity before us is to carefully choose those things we want to be able to recall always and easily. In other words, perhaps we need to think about ‘re-sourcing’ our minds is the answer to our attention issues.
Meet the clever and complex Queen Isabella, “she-wolf” of France; coup leader, wife and mother of kings.
The US Surgeon General has recommended new social media guidelines aimed at protecting young teenagers online; interestingly, Minnesota has already independently made many of them law. This means we’ll get to see their impact as soon as 2025. In a nut-shell, the legislation forces social media companies with more than 10,000 active users to share data regarding how they manipulate algorithms, the ways they use notifications to trigger more time on their platforms, security measures for minors under age 16, and how users’ preferences affect what they see on the platforms.
In this week’s long read, Adam Roberts on the symbolism in Coleridge’s most famous poem; C.S. Lewis, the Greek conception of water, and the after-life.
Currently reading: “Create Dangerously” : A Lecture by Albert Camus
Have a creative weekend.
Image: Indian Summer. Egner, Marie. Austrian. Public Domain.
