“Irish writing has never shied from experimentalism, and nor have readers been frightened off by it. There is, in general, a far more relaxed approach to genre, a less divisive bracketing of “posh” and commercial writers, and less policing of the boundaries between fiction, nonfiction and other art forms.” – Irish Times
Author: Douglas McLennan
The Essential Ingredient That Makes “Wisdom Of The Crowd” Powerful
“In order for the wisdom of crowds to retain its accuracy for making predictions, every member of the group must be given an equal voice, without any one person dominating. As we discovered, the pattern of social influence within groups — that is, who talks to whom and when — is the key determinant of the crowd’s accuracy in making predictions.” – Harvard Business Review
Architect Proposes Translucent Temporary Space For Notre Dame During Rebuilding
“Pavillon Notre-Dame would replicate the exact dimensions of the nave of the cathedral so that it feels familiar. The roof would be made from Ethylene Tetra Fluoro Ethylene (EFTEC) cushions, a lightweight plastic membrane, and the walls from translucent polycarbonate panels.” – dezeen
The Invention Of Money Changed Everything About How The World Works
“Paper money, backed by the authority of the state, was an astonishing innovation, one that reshaped the world. That’s hard to remember: we grow used to the ways we pay our bills and are paid for our work, to the dance of numbers in our bank balances and credit-card statements. It’s only at moments when the system buckles that we start to wonder why these things are worth what they seem to be worth.” – The New Yorker
PT Barnum, The Great Con (And He Considered Running For President)
Barnum’s peculiar gift lay in his relationship to his audience. Better than anyone who’d come before, the Prince of Humbugs understood that the public was willing—even eager—to be conned, provided there was enough entertainment to be had in the process. – The New Yorker
A Libertarian Think Tank Produces An Art Show, Hoping To Win Converts
The underlying theme of “Freedom: Art as the Messenger” was that a natural alignment exists between artistic and libertarian priorities, attitudes and approaches to the world. Artists were entrepreneurs, working independently to create something of their own free will and bringing it to the market where someone else was free to decide what they thought it was worth—a pure form of free trade in which government had no business or purpose. – The Baffler
What If Time Really Doesn’t Have A Direction?
We think that the way things are now depends on how they were in the past, but not on how they are in the future; we think of the laws of nature as telling the Universe how to evolve from earlier to later, and not later to earlier. And so on. – Aeon
Is It Time For Marin Alsop To Speak Up In Baltimore Symphony Plight? (And Would It Help?)
True, music directors don’t usually get involved in labor disputes. Also true is the severity of the money crisis, and the unlikeliness of Alsop being able to help with that. But Baltimore music critic Tim Smith writes that if anyone has the stature and the right to say enough is enough, it’s Alsop. – Tim Smith
At The Museum of The Future, Some Experiments In Virtual Reality
As you can tell, the experience isn’t easy to describe. Afterwards, as I walked back out into the bright, muggy New York evening, I felt equal parts amused, excited and unsettled, and I knew this wasn’t like any other VR I’d seen. – TechCrunch
How Erdogan Purged Turkey’s Intellectuals
“An authoritarian state can do many things to get rid of these democratic types — put them in jail, put them on trial — but ultimately the government must attack the institutions that produce and sustain them. Newspapers can be easy to buy. NGOs are easy to shut down. Universities are much harder to dismantle. But this is what, through the great purge, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his allies sought to do.” – New York Times Magazine