Traditionally, what people get through mass production is something designed for an abstraction of an ideal male body. Customarily, those whose bodies did not fit the standard, who were not spry or male, had to make do. Designers didn’t account for variations of the human body. – Aeon
Category: ideas
In Search Of “Normal” (It’s Become A Festering Battleground)
“Normality” took a battering in the second half of the 20th century. Lots of people were angry about it and did their level best either to tear it down or render it definitively gauche. Who wanted to be normal? Normies were dull. Hammering the normies and transgression for the sake of transgression became a thing and is still a thing. Except, as Irish commentator Angela Nagle observes, it’s become an end in itself, at once “negative, nasty, and nihilistic”. Now it lives online in festering cesspools frequented by people who have no idea (and whose absence of ideas is not their fault) but who need rules and want normality. – Standpoint
Can Computational Science Really Improve Our Insight Into The Humanities?
Questions that historians and literary critics used to debate are increasingly scooped up by quantitative disciplines. In 2011, for instance, a team led by evolutionary biologists cooperated with Google to analyze millions of digitized books, published a study in Science, and announced that they had founded a new field called “culturomics.” – Chronicle of Higher Education
Architects Need To Choose The Planet First
This piece is a fine, furious, anguished, specific call for action. “Our civilisation faces its end date. Cities are expanding refugee camps for a species in crisis. Every particle matters.” Yet architecture firms cut and paste specifications, not using green developers or materials when they could. That must change. – Dezeen
Why Are We Still Talking (And Making Documentary Art) About This Man, Jailed For Murdering His Ex-Girlfriend?
Yes, if you’ve listened to all (or even most) of NPR’s wildly popular true-crime podcast Serial, you might not be ready for an HBO special on Adnan Syed. But would you be if the story concerned Hae Min Lee, the murdered girl at the center of the case? For director Amy Berg, that’s the point. – The New York Times
Why Robots Won’t Replace Us (No Matter How Smart They Are)
If the goal is for them to understand us people in order to perform tasks for us they must be programmed to have their own emotional life and the insight that the ability to abstract is a human commodity. For the robot, language seems to be a fixed material, whereas for the dialectical human it describes and it makes the material comprehendible. – LitHub
The Point Of Art? Not To “Save” Us (But It Can)
Christian Wiman: If there’s a poem that works for me, it’s showing me something of reality. It’s more than that, actually: it’s enabling me to participatein reality again. John Berger has a wonderful essay about looking at the paintings of Van Gogh when he’s in despair and saying that suddenly reality had been salvaged. That’s the word he uses. That’s often what I feel when I come across poetry that I love, that reality’s been salvaged for me. And reality does have to be salvaged for us, all of us, again and again. – New Criterion
Habits Can Make Us Better (Or Worse) But We Should Understand How They Work
The fact that the brain is plastic and changeable allows habits to inscribe themselves in our neural wiring over time by forming privileged connections between brain regions. The influence of behaviourism has enabled researchers to study habits quantitatively and rigorously. But it has also bequeathed a flattened notion of habit that overlooks the concept’s wider philosophical implications. – Aeon
Bill T. Jones On The Artistic Struggle To Make Art Useful
“I wanted to make a piece about a man who saves himself through art. I don’t want people to think he’s just a train wreck. The most important thing an artist has is the will to do something — it’s evidence of life and a spiritual wellness, even if the body is decrepit.” – Washington Post
You Know The Straw Man Fallacy — Here’s The Burning Man Fallacy (Which You’ve Definitely Seen In Action)
“It is not composed simply of a single distortion, but rather a slew of mischaracterizations bent on representing one’s opponents in the worst light. … In deploying the burning man fallacy, one not only stuffs an opposing figure with straw, but then proceeds to surround it with more tinder and additional flammable material, with the intention of committing the view at issue to the flames, along with whole traditions, movements, and ways of thinking.” – 3 Quarks Daily