In conversations about social media, online activity, and entertainment standards, people like to talk about how much “content” they “consume.” I’ve grown to hate these two words. “Content” is such a general term that we may as well say “things.” (“I’ve been looking at a lot of things online.” “Our marketing strategy is to produce
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In Rebecca Serle’s novel “In Five Years,” narrator and protagonist Dannie Cohan follows the path she set for herself as an adolescent. She becomes a lawyer with no ambitions for the courtroom, tackling instead the crisp, clear language of the law and contracts. “It was like poetry, but poetry with outcome, poetry with concrete meaning—with
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“Is this heaven?” Shoeless Joe Jackson asks Ray Kinsella in Field of Dreams. I’ve always loved that line. Growing up on an Iowa farm, we had our own ball field behind our house. My dad built a backstop for my brothers and me long before Kevin Costner ever heard “The Voice.” On summer evenings, Dad would
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Recently, my YouTube feed has been dishing up videos of ambient background music created without AI. With uncanny precision, the internet gods of YouTube have identified my sympathies. They seem to know that I have declared unending war on so-called “art” made by artificial intelligence. I play these recommended videos out of mere protest –
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After my sophomore year of college, I interned with USA Today Opinion as a fact-checker. The work was tedious, albeit satisfying; I spent hours poring over news sites, scanning through scientific and demographic studies, and running plagiarism checkers to ensure that every claim in the opinion column was backed by legitimate and trustworthy sources. I
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“I’m just not affected by it.” This statement captures the common attitude toward entertainment today. More often than not, we think that what we consume on our screens is harmless and detached from our values or behavior. But is it? “We become what we behold,” the saying – often attributed to Marshall McLuhan, a philosopher
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