Category: ideas

If we look closely, it’s apparent that evolutionary psychology is due for an overhaul. Rather than hard-wired cognitive instincts, our heads are much more likely to be populated by “cognitive gadgets, tinkered and toyed with over successive generations. Culture is responsible not just for the grist of the mind – what we do and make – but for fabricating its mills, the very way the mind works.” – Aeon

The upside of winning is pleasure and glory, but the cost of always winning is never getting to know how much more was in you. The only way to find the limit is to cross it. But you can’t lose unless you fight your heart out. Which is why I say, more fighting, more biting. – The Point

So many things seem bleak. Politics, the environment, the growing wealth gap, climate change. It’s enough to make anyone despair. But if you despair you become paralyzed. So how, exactly should we think about the coming apocalypse without succumbing to hopelessness? – The Outline

With Bay Area-based tech companies scheduled to hold initial public offerings this year, the city of instant millionaires is about to have thousands of even newer millionaires. And many residents of this city — secretly and not-so-secretly — fear that 2019 is the year San Francisco becomes a truly impossible place to live. – Washington Post

We get that little jolt of pleasure when we share something online and the likes and comments pile up. It’s addictive (and meant to be). But there’s a case to be made that empty low-cost likes can start to replace genuine sharing of experience in real life. Are “likes” the new junk food? – The New York Times

Americans seemed to be into empathy from roughly post-WWII to the 2000s. Then things started going sideways. Now, it’s “Empathy, but just for your own team. And empathizing with the other team? That’s practically a taboo. And it turns out that this brand of selective empathy is a powerful force.” – NPR

Basically, this is the fastest way … so far. Things still might change, but “it splits up digits, uses an improved version of the fast Fourier transform, and takes advantage of other advances made over the past forty years.” – Quanta Magazine

Molly Shannon, an actor who spent years on Saturday Night Live, didn’t think much of or about Dickinson until she got the chance to play her in a new movie. Then things changed. Shannon: “We have this story that she wanted her poems burned upon death when in reality she’s an L.G.B.T.Q. hero. She’s a model for new wave feminism, which talks about equality for all. [Screams] It makes me want to start a riot.” – The New York Times

OK, fine, everything we thought was good in art from the 1950s and 1960s was indeed funded by the CIA in some way. As for Dr. Zhivago, “Literary propaganda was a company-wide preoccupation. The scheme went all the way to the top.” – LitHub

Indeed, they do. The worst environmental disasters – the ones that killed the most people – were often deliberately worsened by predatory governments, companies and individuals. Societies that escaped environmental disaster were relatively safe from colonial exploitation, and flexible in the face of shifting environmental circumstances. We face an uncertain future but, like early moderns, there is much we can do to either ease human suffering in the face of environmental upheaval – or make it a great deal worse. – Aeon