Fact-checkers know that in a digital medium, the web is a web. It’s not just a metaphor. You understand a particular node by its relationship in a web. So the smartest thing to do is to consult the web to understand any particular node. That is very different from reading Thucydides, where you look at internal criticism and consistency because there really isn’t a documentary record beyond Thucydides.
Category: ideas
On Cultivating The Inner Voice That Defines You
Do people in adulthood experience inner speech in the same way as children – or even as each other? Do most of us even have an inner voice – an internal commentator narrating our lives and experiences from one moment to the next?
Charting A History Of How Creativity Works
When younger generations emerge to challenge the bygone revolutions of their forebears, it’s said to be in the service of a grand teleological arc, an earnest desire to do things better. But this has always struck me as an incomplete picture of how culture works. Sometimes brinksmanship tips toward true disdain, and desires to merely show someone up descend into fantasies of destruction. Can dark, trifling feelings produce uplifting art?
What’s Coming To A Mall Near You? Memory Rooms
Or even memory towns. The plan is to help those with memory issue – Alzheimer’s and other age-related dementia – in “reminiscence therapy.” The hope? “Dozens of faux ‘memory towns’ will sprout around the U.S. in coming years. Amid a retail meltdown, the malls where teenagers used to hit up American Eagle and Orange Julius could morph into escapist domains for the elderly.”
What A Nation Loses When Its Museum Goes Up In Flames
For generations, the children of Rio de Janeiro – and those farther afield – have been defining themselves and their history at the National Museum. “A former colonial slave traders’ home that was later turned into a royal palace, the building itself was the site of key moments in the country’s history, part of the national narrative, and therefore a place of deep symbolism and pride.” Now it’s almost all gone.
Sarah Waters On How Her Novel – Now Movie – ‘The Little Stranger’ Is A Perfect Metaphor For Brexit Britain
The author says of her horror novel and new movie: “After Brexit is Britain going to be a kind of Hundreds Hall, a decaying place with a big wall around it, with an inflated idea of itself, endlessly trying to keep alive a mythical kind of world?”
On The Misuse Of Civility
Lewis Lapham: “The operatic protest blowing through the country’s internet portals raises the question as to whether the sound and fury signifies something or nothing, the telling of “mischief-making,” fairy-tale lies that is the life of our good and great consumer economy, or the voicing of competitive truth that is the vitality of a democratic republic. It’s hard to know which is which because over the past forty years we’ve become accustomed to pretending that democracy is a peaceful idea, something civil, orderly, quiet, and safe. It isn’t.”
More Scientists + Internet = More Progress? It Isn’t Turning Out That Way
Globalization, the digitization of knowledge, and the growing number of scientists all seem, at first glance, like positive trends for the progress of science. But these trends are Janus-faced, for they also encourage a hyper-competitive, trend-driven, and herd-like approach to scientific research.
The Loneliness Problem
By the 21st century, loneliness has become ubiquitous. Commentators call it ‘an epidemic’, a condition akin to ‘leprosy’, and a ‘silent plague’ of civilisation. In 2018, the United Kingdom went so far as to appoint a Minister for Loneliness. Yet loneliness is not a universal condition; nor is it a purely visceral, internal experience. It is less a single emotion and more a complex cluster of feelings, composed of anger, grief, fear, anxiety, sadness and shame.
Pleasures Of The Body Versus Pleasures Of The Mind: A Muddy Debate
The entire debate assumes a clear divide between the intellectual and bodily, the human and the animal, which is no longer tenable. These days, few of us are card-carrying dualists who believe that we are made of immaterial minds and material bodies. We have plenty of scientific evidence for the importance of biochemistry and hormones in all that we do and think. Nonetheless, dualistic assumptions still inform our thinking.