#19th-20th-century

#19th-20th-century

I wanted to write a book about how the smartphone changed the world, but the more I researched, the clearer it became that phones were actually the latest step in this evolution of storytelling technology that stretches all the way back to prehistoric times.

The past decade has seen a surge of new ways of self-expression online, but somehow, netizens reminisce about the grainy selfies with dog ear filters, old movies, and less AI-generated content.

In antiquity, many opined about "the elements" in combination. Around 2500 years ago, Leucippus and Democritus founded the idea of atoms. Perhaps everything, they opined, was composed of indivisible building blocks. In the late 1700s, hydrogen and oxygen were discovered. Circa 1804, John Dalton revived atomism to explain chemical behavior. Then in 1869, Mendeleev developed the periodic table: organizing the atoms.

Books rise to the level of enduring art, I believe, when their writers take something ordinary and reintroduce it in a way that radically transforms it. The right work can make a subject that's never crossed my mind, or that strikes me as aggressively boring, into something incantatory, pulsing with meaning.

The war began the week of my 26th birthday. There was a lightness on that day, something born from what remained of our childhood. Sparks like candy, crackling in our mouths: colorful letters; laughter leaking out through voice notes; hearts adorning our text chats; an abundance of cake. But the days that followed are laid out like burnt matchsticks; once the first one was lit, the flames consumed the rest. The war spared nothing on the calendar; I have had no other birthdays since.

We might be exposed to more ads and commercials today than ever before in human history, but the idea of advertising itself is certainly not a new concept. According to Instapage, the first signs of advertisements actually appeared in ancient Egyptian steel carvings from 2000 BC. Meanwhile, the first printed ad was published in 1472, when William Caxton decided to advertise a book by posting flyers on church doors in England.

This is probably only funny to me as a first-gen American of Western European parents.

H ave you heard Solomon Ray's new album Faithful Soul? It's number one on the gospel charts-and entirely AI generated, just like the musical artist behind it. The idea that a hit Spotify artist might not be human is a satire of the attention economy itself: an ecosystem once based on authenticity and connection now topped by a synthetic voice engineered for maximum uplift. What does "soul" even mean when it's made by software trained on real music?

Peter Drucker saw this symbiosis first. He realized that the new industrial order would depend on a worker who produced ideas instead of widgets. The knowledge worker became the engine of prosperity, and management became the social technology that synchronized millions of minds. The modern firm was as much an invention as the transistor it depended on. Three decades later, Tom Peters caught the next wave.

U.S. President Donald Trump, with his lust for Greenland and hectoring of Europe, thinks the world is at his mercy,and thatthe U.S. is invincible. He's right on the first point. But he discovered this week that he's wrong about the second one. In Davos at the World Economic Forum, Trump climbed down on his Greenland threats after his actions caused chaos in the markets.

This APA Blog series has broadly explored philosophy and technology with a throughline on the influence of technology and AI on well-being. This month's post brings those themes into focus recounting a vital Washington Post Opinion piece by friend of the APA Blog, Samuel Kimbriel. Samuel is the founding director of the Aspen Institute's Philosophy and Society Initiative and Editor at Large for Wisdom of Crowds. We collaborated on a Substack Newsletter about intellectual ambition, building on his essay, Thinking is Risky.

Striking silhouettes, sumptuous fabrics, bright colours, frills galore, and all manner of ornate accessories define the clothing of the Victorian period, that is, during the reign of Queen Victoria, which spanned seven decades of the 19th century. This was a time of dynamic change as the Industrial Revolution resulted in an expansion of the middle classes. Victorians were persuaded to part with their growing disposable income by mass advertising that ranged from gorgeous colour supplements in popular magazines to striking posters in railway stations.

This open-access book brings together more than thirty essays on languages and the ways they develop, interact, and influence one another. Its main focus is the Middle East, where Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic long existed side by side and often overlapped in everyday use, scholarship, and culture. In line with Geoffrey (Khan)'s commitment to the maximally accessible dissemination of research, this Festschrift has been published in both open-access digital editions and affordable printed formats.