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 these articles, 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:
“Why AI Isn’t Going to Make Art” (New Yorker)
Because Ted Chiang attempts to stem the panic around the idea that AI will soon replace artists.
Art is notoriously hard to define, and so are the differences between good art and bad art. But let me offer a generalization: art is something that results from making a lot of choices. This might be easiest to explain if we use fiction writing as an example. When you are writing fiction, you are—consciously or unconsciously—making a choice about almost every word you type; to oversimplify, we can imagine that a ten-thousand-word short story requires something on the order of ten thousand choices. When you give a generative-A.I. program a prompt, you are making very few choices…
“‘Our daughters went viral on social media. Then everything changed.’” (WaPo)
Because this illustrated narrative from Beatrix Lockwood follows a relatively simple prompt: why would a family post their lives on YouTube? There are some absolutely fascinating quotes from the parents and the kids in this short article.
“…the kids are part of the entertainment. We are parents first.”
“We’re as silly in our videos as we are in real life.”
“We make them every week to keep the machine going.”
“Why I changed my mind about volunteering” (Vox)
Because Rachel M. Cohen dissects a social trend of the last 20 years: the rise in pursuing “systemic change” and the declining rate of volunteering.
Since I received the reader’s note about homelessness last fall, I’ve been thinking more about the cost of all this cynicism. Were the arguments against individual action even helpful? I also started to wonder if these beliefs contributed to the American “friendship recession” and loneliness crisis I kept hearing about. Back in 2000, in his book Bowling Alone, political scientist Robert Putnam highlighted declines in American church attendance, volunteering, civic associations, and team sports; it seems our “social cohesion” had only gotten worse since then. Gen Z and millennials volunteer at lower rates than adults born in earlier generations, even though there is pretty overwhelming research that volunteering and donating makes people happier, and boosts their self-esteem, physical health, and lifespan.
“Don’t Trust the Election Forecasts” (Politico)
Because Justin Grimmer declares:
I’m a political scientist who develops and applies machine learning methods, like forecasts, to political problems. The truth is we don’t have nearly enough data to know whether these models are any good at making presidential prognostications. And the data we do have suggests these models may have real-world negative consequences in terms of driving down turnout.
“Surgeon General: Parents Are at Their Wits’ End. We Can Do Better.” (NYT)
Because Dr. Vivek Murthy raises parenting stress to a public health concern.
A recent study by the American Psychological Association revealed that 48 percent of parents say most days their stress is completely overwhelming, compared with 26 percent of other adults who reported the same. They are navigating traditional hardships of parenting — worrying about money and safety, struggling to get enough sleep — as well as new stressors, including omnipresent screens, a youth mental health crisis and widespread fear about the future.
ICYMI on For the Good of the Public and The Morning Five
What a Pluralistic America Needs From Christians (Eboo Patel and Michael Wear)
Christianity and a Healthier Politics (Senator Chris Coons and Michael Wear)
As a Georgia resident, what does one *do* about the brewing situation with the state election commission and rule changes? Like, I have no power or influence on anything directly. A lot of people are wary of responding because the response previous legislation seemed to be overreacting. We don't know what local election administrators might do under the new rules but we can see that it exposes the election process, which was fair and efficient and transparent before, to a lot more varieties of objections and influences. It seems to be driven by "election denial" conspiracy theory factions.
Like, we hope it doesn't screw everything up. We hope nobody is able to use it to manipulate results. We spend 4 years harping on about the near-sacred value of trusting election results and processes and now maybe some wrench in the gears that tempts one to challenge that. However, doing so would seem to play into the hands of the "election denial" conspiracy theories, which, the way I see it, are possibly a self-fulfilling prophecy enabled by this series of actions and...
Yeah, what now?