In this event, Kathleen Higgins and Kate Warlow-Corcoran will reflect on the ways aesthetics aids people experiencing loss. Some practices related to bereavement, such as funerals, are scripted, but many others are recursive, improvisational, mundane—telling stories, listening to music, and reflecting on art or literature.

Romanticism is often reduced to nostalgic pastoralism and solitary contemplation of the sublime. But a radical strand of Romantic writers and thinkers offered sweeping political, ecological, and religious critiques of capitalism, racism, settler colonialism, and environmental destruction.

There are a myriad critiques of AI out there: it’s stealing authors’ copyright material, it’s undermining originality, individuality, creativity, it’s creating slop and further downgrading the quality of the internet, taking away entry-level jobs, triggering psychosis in vulnerable people, creating yet another distraction for our already fragmented attention. But one critique stands above all else: AI is dumbing us down.