The Top 5: Disney adults, conspiracy theories, manifestation, Memento Mori, and siblings
Welcome to the latest edition of the Top 5 articles we’ve read this week. Each week, we read dozens of articles in the hope we find essays and reporting that speak to big ideas, trends, future looks, and incredible human stories. We hope you enjoy our list, and do always let us know if you have a suggestion or a recommendation!
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The Top 5 articles for your week:
“Memento Mori” (The Baffler)
Because Tamara Kneese writes about the most unsettling uses of AI and asks whether or not humans can truly direct AI for good.
Intergenerational communication with dead family members is a canny selling point for a smart device, provided you’re not concerned with the mass manipulation of a grieving public. It is also a fantasy that barely covers for Amazon’s real goal: harnessing and selling data produced in intimate home settings and maintaining customers and their data by whatever means necessary.
“The Long, Strange History of ‘Manifesting’” (NYT)
Because CCPL 2023 Public Life Fellow Tara Isabella Burton examines the popularity of the “quasi-spiritual science of willing things into existence.”
“A Subtle Shift Shaking Up Sibling Relationships” (The Atlantic)
Because Michael Waters writes about how there are a growing number of sibling age-gaps.
“Why are Americans obsessed with conspiracy theories?” (Substack)
Because Brian Klaas writes about the history of conspiracy theories.
After World War I, however, there was a marked shift in the typology of conspiracy theories. It wasn’t just the ethnic or religious other that was to be feared, but the government itself. We became a country obsessed by shadowy plots not by people who looked different or had different beliefs, but by those who lurked behind closed doors at the centers of power. As Olmstead points out, part of the reason for this shift was the government’s enforcement of the “Espionage and Sedition Acts” during World War I, in which hundreds were imprisoned for “disloyal, profane, scurrilous or abusive language” against the government.
“The “Disney adult” industrial complex” (The New Statesman)
Because Amelia Tait explores the pejorative term - “disney adult” - and how this isn’t so much of a phenomenon as it is a marketing outcome that the Disney company has purposefully pursued for decades.
ICYMI on the podcast…
The Morning Five: March 4, 2024
The Morning Five: March 5, 2024
The Morning Five: March 6, 2024
The Morning Five: March 7, 2024
Episode 102: What did you think of the State of the Union address?
Birds Aren't Real