So, what happens when people stop writing letters? Or when books become less central to society—a tangential diversion or eccentricity—less important than movies, which are less important than the premium cable channels, which are less important than Netflix and Amazon Prime, which are less important than video games, all of which together are less important than social media? What happens when our writers and thinkers express themselves through Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitter instead of on the page?
Category: ideas
Our Hyperconnected World Seems To Make Us More Unhappy
“Since my boyhood, the rise of digital connectivity has transformed every human interaction, from buying a sandwich to anal sex. The period has coincided with a crisis of intimacy. A recent survey of 20,000 Americans found that almost half suffered from loneliness, which now qualifies as a chronic public health problem. Narcissism, a related condition, has been rising over 30 years of clinical studies and has become so widespread and so fundamental to all aspects of culture that the question is whether it can properly be identified as a pathology any longer.”
How Schizophrenia Illuminates The Qualities Of Pleasure
Pleasure is not just about experiencing an enjoyable moment. It also involves anticipation – a connection between one’s present and future selves. This is a crucial distinction. Pleasure is not just about the consummatory (that is, in-the-moment) experience, but also anticipatory pleasure: the ability to both look forward to future pleasurable experiences, as well as to enjoy the anticipation of pleasure in and of itself. Schizophrenia makes this distinction clear.
New York City Is Losing Its Retail Stores – And With Them, Its Street Culture
Paying seven figures to buy a place in Manhattan or San Francisco might have always been dubious. But what’s the point of paying New York prices to live in a neighborhood that’s just biding its time to become “everywhere else”?
A Case That Mathematics Is The Most Beautiful Art
The modern separation among scholars between intellectual history and the history of mathematics is untenable as mathematics might be the ultimate intellectual endeavour. In the words of the 19th-century German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss: ‘mathematics is the queen of the sciences’; like literacy, widespread numeracy is one of the defining features of modernity. In fact, one of the great shifts of modernity has been how mathematicians changed their view of mathematics, transforming the focus of their work from the study of the natural world to the study of ideas and concepts.
The Power Of Relics: Why Humans Cannot Resist The Magical Potency Of Charismatic Objects
“Throughout history and in all cultural contexts – not just religious ones – people seem to spontaneously endow certain things with special powers, and to proclaim that contact with these persons and things, even by proxy, will have miraculous effects. … Why do humans so often ascribe special powers to things? One place to search for an answer is the cognitive processing that underlies the human understanding of force.”
Deep Disagreements Over Facts And How We Form Beliefs
One particularly pernicious form of disagreement arises when we not only disagree about individuals facts… but also disagree about how best to form beliefs about those facts, that is, about how to gather and assess evidence in proper ways. This is deep disagreement, and it’s the form that most societal disagreements take. Understanding these disagreements will not inspire optimism about our ability to find consensus.
Have We Screwed Up The Balance Between Idleness And Work?
Like Montaigne, who played a diffident but competent role in politics—he was mayor of Bordeaux—most of us forge a rotten compromise between idleness and industry. What else can we do? We see the flourishing of life in the little moments, as we see the scale of its shirked responsibilities. To manage our ambivalence is necessary work.
M.I.T. Makes A Billion-Dollar Bet On AI, Starting A New College
Massachusetts Institute of Technology is taking a particularly ambitious step, creating a new college backed by a planned investment of $1 billion. Two-thirds of the funds have already been raised, M.I.T. said, in announcing the initiative on Monday. The linchpin gift of $350 million came from Stephen A. Schwarzman, chief executive of the Blackstone Group, the big private equity firm. The college, called the M.I.T. Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing, will create 50 new faculty positions and many more fellowships for graduate students.
Power Of Speech: How Credibility Gets Assigned
The Kavanaugh hearings bring up an interesting linguistic phenomenon. Without thinking, we might assume a nebulous, unquestionable power belongs to the words of the person who succeeds to some office, whether it be the President, a Senator, or a Supreme Court Justice. Authority is almost godlike in this way. This power sometimes seems vast and immovable. But many people are waking up to the fact that this power is very much constructed, through laws and authority agreed upon and given by a very human collective, within a system of their making, in order for a community to work together to perform extraordinary, almost miraculous feats (such as building a civilization or society).