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More from On the Arts

Generative AI and the Falling Costs of Art Creation

For individual creators on a budget, the future is bright.

a year ago 83 votes
On the Arts: A Year-End Review

A brief guide to everything published this year.

a year ago 48 votes
Winter as Reading Season

David Foster Wallace on the necessity of quiet time in order to read.

a year ago 40 votes
The Meaning of Melancholy

An Interview with Hans Maes

a year ago 42 votes
How to Write a Proper Haiku

A Starter's Guide to the Deceptively Simple Poetic Form

a year ago 40 votes

More in creative

Daydream fatigue

Spend enough time inventing possible futures in your head and you won’t have any time to build the future we will all share. Time to get to work.

20 hours ago 2 votes
A Visualization of the History of Technology: 1,889 Innovations Across Three Million Years

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” So holds the third and most famous of the “three laws” originally articulated by science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. Even when it was first published in the late nineteen-sixties, Clarke’s third law would have felt true to any resident of the developed world, surrounded by and […]

21 hours ago 2 votes
A billion choices

Game theory has a lousy name. When most people think of games, they think of commercial stuff for kids, like Chutes and Ladders or possibly Monopoly. But a game is simply a system where humans, facing scarcity, make choices. Scarcity leads to choices and to competition. It turns out that our culture, our commerce and […]

2 days ago 2 votes
Hear the World’s Oldest Instrument, the “Neanderthal Flute,” Dating Back Over 43,000 Years

Several years ago, we brought you a transcription and a couple of audio interpretations of the oldest known song in the world, discovered in the ancient Syrian city of Ugarit and dating back to the 14th century B.C.E.. Likely performed on an instrument resembling an ancient lyre, the so-called “Hurrian Cult Song” or “Hurrian Hymn […]

4 days ago 4 votes
Use a lot of words

Verbosity is the new brevity. Google felt like a miracle. We could type just a word or two (“blog“) and it would magically guess what we wanted and take us there. This shortcut spread from Google to the search built into online shopping as well. How convenient. A few words and done. AI isn’t like […]

5 days ago 4 votes