While anti-conformists may, at first, succeed in devising their own personal brand of sartorial rebelliousness, it’s followed by an inevitable, if unintentional, synchronization around a single appearance. Touboul’s study looks at how such people seem to inevitably become synchronized. He suspects that a major influence on the way it happens may be the speed of propagation of styles through a culture. https://bigthink.com/the-present/hipsters-look-alike ..read more

The number and variety of zero- and low-alcohol beverages, a once-lagging category that academics and the World Health Organization refer to as “NoLos,” has exploded in the past five-plus years. The already growing “sober curious” movement—made up of adults who want to practice more thoughtful or limited alcohol consumption while still socializing over a drink at home or at a bar—snowballed during pandemic shutdowns. Today, about 70 NoLo bottle shops like Hopscotch dot the U.S., along with several dozen nonalcoholic, or NA, bars, most less than four years old. https ..read more

Apple’s entrance into V.R. has symbolic weight, because the company has had so much influence on computers and phones. Back in 1984, when the Macintosh was introduced, a few members of the Mac team left Apple to join my startup, V.P.L., and help us create the first generation of commercial V.R. products. At the time, we guessed that Apple itself would enter the market in 2010. We knew that the consumer adoption of the technology was a long way off. We were selling tools for millions of dollars to customers like nasa. But despite the conservative clients, our early V.R. software was radic ..read more

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Today, AI and its related terms are entering the lexicon, underscoring its rising cultural impact. Generative AI like ChatGPT, once the mutterings of a select few AI enthusiasts, has quickly become a household name accessed by billions of monthly users.  Reflecting the impact of AI on popular culture, the Cambridge Dictionary recently named “hallucinate” as their word of the year, adding a new AI-centric definition; “When an artificial intelligence (= a computer system that has some of the qualities that the human brain has, such as the ability to produce language in a way that seem ..read more

Merriam-Webster Inc. chose “authentic” as its word of the year, highlighting how misinformation on platforms like Elon Musk’s X Corp. and the rise of artificial intelligence have made it harder to assess what’s real and what’s fake. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-27/-authentic-named-word-of-the-year-as-ai-blurs-line-between-real-and-fake#xj4y7vzkg ..read more

Faux leather has been popular for decades, since the days of Warm Leatherette, the 1978 single later covered by Grace Jones. It has become a material as fetishised as it is fetishistic. “Warm leatherette / A tear of petrol / Is in your eye / The hand brake / Penetrates your thigh,” sang Jones. The problem, however, is that most pleather, faux leather and vegan leather is a product of the fossil fuel industry, and there is no system in place to recycle it. We are simply creating a material monster, its production contributing to the climate crisis and its pollution destroying our ecosystems. h ..read more

The automobile functionally collapsed physical space, especially in the smaller states in the Northeast. It was all of a sudden very easy for a perpetrator committing an offense in one jurisdiction to cross state lines. And our criminal justice system was notably patchworked, without one centralized law enforcement bureaucracy. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-11-14/in-rules-of-the-road-a-timely-chronicle-of-cars-crime-and-the-law ..read more

To read changes in culture early, we analyze words and visuals as clusters of distinct societal traits and behaviors that indicate patterns of social change. Linguistic signifiers reveal such codes of behavior and inform archetypal narratives.  Four narrative spaces present themselves across talent in the United States. This research systematically gathered 50 relevant quotes spanning various talent genres. Each quote was categorized based on its linguistic attributes, distinguishing between residual, dominant, emergent, or disruptive language. A tally of the classified quotes reveals sta ..read more

Nations across the globe could see their power rise or fall depending on how they harness and manage the development of artificial intelligence (AI). Regardless of whether AI poses an existential risk to humanity, governments will need to develop new regulatory frameworks to identify, evaluate, and respond to the variety of AI-enabled challenges to come. https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PEA3034-1.html?utm_campaign=&utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=rand_social&utm_content=1699811520 ..read more