Category: ideas

It’s a question worth asking. To imagine a better version of our mediated world, we need to acknowledge these alternatives and to embrace their multiplicity—and often to retrace our steps to roads not taken in the past. – Public Books

It was 1923, and Francesco Ruffini was going to rescue science. The Italian senator’s plan was simple: Give scientists an ownership stake in their discoveries—a sort of patent on the laws of nature they discovered. The idea has re-emerged in the US Senate.  – Slate

We can’t resolve disagreements about how much the information we possess supports a hypothesis just by gathering more information. Instead, we can make progress only by way of philosophical reflection on the space of possibilities, the information we have, and how strongly it supports some possibilities over others. – Aeon

The economists of the early 20th century did not foresee that work might evolve from a means of material production to a means of identity production. They failed to anticipate that, for the poor and middle class, work would remain a necessity; but for the college-educated elite, it would morph into a kind of religion, promising identity, transcendence, and community. Call it workism. – The Atlantic

As employees in a hyperproductive, work-obsessed world, we’ve become acutely aware of any opportunity for optimization. Attempts by companies like Google or Freshly to create services that save you time misfire, as millennials see them not as services that will give them more time to relax, but as services that will increase the amount of time they’re available to work. – Medium

Carolina Miranda: “Before California was West, it was North and it was East: the uppermost periphery of the Mexican Empire, and the arrival point for Chinese immigrants making the perilous journey from Guangdong. It was part of different maps that co-exist, one on top of the other: layers of visions and lesser-known narratives, that are ongoing and still unfolding.” – Guernica

Well, yes, it can be. If you want to see a Western that focuses on women without being cutesy or trite about it, look abroad. The form is still legendary; now it lives better in places where “it’s no longer a throwback.” – Los Angeles Review of Books

How did we get to this idiotic point? Workism. What’s that? “It is the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose; and the belief that any policy to promote human welfare must always encourage more work.” – The Atlantic

If you thought middle school girls were “innocent” while middle school boys awoke to their own sexuality, well, think again. In new movies and TV shows, “our girls are awkward and weird. They are undergoing orthodontic treatments. They have made out with every bedpost and doorframe in their bedrooms. Through their eyes, it is the boys who become smooth, uncomplicated objects.” – The New York Times

You might wonder how people who seem so good by occupation could be so bad in private. The theory of moral licensing could help explain why: When humans are good, it says, we give ourselves license to be bad. – Nautilus