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Culture

Art, film, music, television, and criticism

The Attention Collapse Is Not a Media Problem — It Is a Cognitive Infrastructure Crisis
Lead Story

The Attention Collapse Is Not a Media Problem — It Is a Cognitive Infrastructure Crisis

A 2026 MIT/Stanford study places the average adult attention span at 7.6 seconds — a 36.7% decline since 2000. The downstream effects of this collapse reach far beyond media into democratic deliberation, educational formation, and the structure of public knowledge.

Catherine OloweMarch 18, 2026
The Silence Premium
Culture

The Silence Premium

Demand for noise-reduced environments is growing faster than the broader wellness market — a measurable behavioral signal about the attentional economy's counter-cultural reaction with significant market and political implications.

Catherine Olowe7 min
The Prestige TV Hangover
Culture

The Prestige TV Hangover

For two decades, the television industry convinced us that peak TV was a form of high culture. The correction is now underway, and it turns out that peak TV was something rarer and stranger: a convergence of circumstances that will not repeat.

Catherine Olowe11 min
The Second Golden Age of Television Is Over
Culture

The Second Golden Age of Television Is Over

The prestige TV era produced some of the greatest drama in the medium's history. Then the economics that made it possible collapsed, and we're only beginning to understand what we've lost.

Nadia Chen13 min
The Museum Is Not Neutral
Culture

The Museum Is Not Neutral

For two centuries, Western museums presented themselves as stewards of humanity's heritage. The reckoning now underway reveals how selective that humanity always was.

Leila Farahani11 min
The Death of the Album
Culture

The Death of the Album

Spotify didn't just change how we listen to music. It dismantled the architecture of meaning that the album spent seventy years building.

Zara Okonkwo14 min
What Hollywood Lost
Culture

What Hollywood Lost

The studios didn't kill the mid-budget film by accident. They killed it on purpose — and the consequences for American cinema are now visible everywhere.

James Cartwright12 min