In May 2024, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sparked a firestorm by referencing the 2013 movie “Her” to highlight the novelty of the latest iteration of ChatGPT. Within days, actor Scarlett Johansson, who…
Author: cwbnb
How the surrealists used randomness as a catalyst for creative expression
A century ago, French writer and poet André Breton penned his “Manifesto of Surrealism,” which launched an art movement known for creating bizarre hybrids of words and images. These juxtapositions, often generated…
For many Olympic medalists, silver stings more than bronze
At the 2022 Beijing Olympics, a distraught Alexandra Trusova won silver and promptly declared, “I will never skate again.” Swimmer Michael Phelps displayed a mix of frustration and disappointment at the 2012…
Journalism has become ground zero for the vocation crisis
This year has been a grim one for journalism, with layoffs at the Los Angeles Times, Time magazine, NBC News, Forbes, National Geographic, Business Insider and Sports Illustrated. Further cuts loom in…
What the 3.2 million-year-old Lucy fossil reveals about nudity and shame
Fifty years ago, scientists discovered a nearly complete fossilized skull and hundreds of pieces of bone of a 3.2-million-year-old female specimen of the genus Australopithecus afarensis, often described as “the mother of…
An homage to the dad joke, one of the great traditions of fatherhood
“Dad, I’m hungry.” “Hi, hungry. I’m Dad.” If you haven’t been asleep for the past 20 years, you’ll probably recognize this exchange as a dad joke. The term dad joke is credited…
Spikes, seat dividers, even ‘Baby Shark’ − camping bans like the one under review at SCOTUS are part of broader strategies that push out homeless people
Should cities be allowed to outlaw sleeping in public, even when there are no beds available in local shelters? This is what the U.S. Supreme Court will decide in its review of…
There’s a strange history of white journalists trying to better understand the Black experience by ‘becoming’ Black
A peculiar desire seems to still haunt some white people: “I wish I knew what it was like to be Black.” This wish is different from wanting to cosplay the coolness of…
Records of Pompeii’s survivors have been found – and archaeologists are starting to understand how they rebuilt their lives
On Aug. 24, in A.D. 79, Mount Vesuvius erupted, shooting over 3 cubic miles of debris up to 20 miles (32.1 kilometers) in the air. As the ash and rock fell to…
5 young-adult fiction novels that explore LGBTQ+ teen lives
In recognition of LGBTQ+ Pride Month, The Conversation reached out to Gabriel Acevedo and James B. Blasingame, English professors at Arizona State University who focus on sexuality and sexual identity in young-adult…