It’s a step more useful for midterm politics than for reality, unfortunately: “All 49 members of the Democratic caucus are in favor of the resolution, along with Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine). If it passes, the resolution still faces a tough vote in the House, as well as the signature of President Donald Trump.”
Category: ideas
Instagram’s Location Services Can Transcend Tracking
Watching strangers’ stories on Instagram helps connect to the past – and to what’s at the location today.
Even If The Only Thing To Fear Is Fear Itself, Isn’t That Kind Of Useful?
Turns out USians are most afraid, right now, that government officials are corrupt, and afraid for the planet, and afraid of losing health care. Whew, whatever happened to public speaking? Well, we’re complex: “We’re simultaneously too primitive and too evolved for our own good. Our lizard brains are ruthlessly efficient.”
Today In Unintended Consequences, Sweden’s Thieves Can’t Rob Banks, So They’re Stealing Owls
Sweden’s war on cash has changed a lot about the country, including how robbers operate. “As Sweden’s supply of banknotes continues to dwindle, criminals have shown new enthusiasm for the endangered-species black market, previously cornered by reptile wranglers and orchid thieves. Crimes involving protected species recently reached their highest level in a decade. A single great gray owl — known as the ‘phantom of the north’ — now goes for 1 million kronor (about $120,000) on the dark web.”
The Flaws Of Science Deniers
This widespread rejection of scientific findings presents a perplexing puzzle to those of us who value an evidence-based approach to knowledge and policy. Yet many science deniers do cite empirical evidence. The problem is that they do so in invalid, misleading ways. Psychological research illuminates these ways.
Why Has French Intellectualism Declined? And Why Is Its Reputation Still Intact?
While in the new millennium the quality of French intellectual life has plummeted, its reputation remains. Shlomo Sand bracingly compares media-friendly intellectuals such as Houellebecq, Éric Zemmour and Alain Finkielkraut to Nazi-collaborating writers such as Robert Brasillach and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle. Like such past figures, Sand argues, they cling to a France that is “totally imaginary” and yearn for it to be purified of the Other. In 1940 that meant Jews, in 2018 Islam.
The Chaos In How We Determine Scientific Research
A clearer sense of the greater science ecosystem is required to figure out what role science should play and how society can best make that happen. Who gets to do research in the 21st century, and why? How has it changed over time? Is science in good shape, and how can we know? When I started asking these questions I realized there’s a lot that even scientists still don’t know about themselves.
An “Intellectual Dark Web?” Really?
What they all share is not a general commitment to intellectual free exchange but a specific political hostility to “multiculturalism” and all that it entails. In previous decades, their views were close to hegemonic in the intellectual center.
The End Of Theory?
In the United States, theory has become a utopian experiment and experience: it exists alongside increasingly historicist literary studies as a site of mixture and reprieve; it promises, for example, to help literary scholars moonlight as media theorists and art historians, while reminding them to consider the horrors of colonialism and the errors of the Enlightenment. Meanwhile, it makes the rounds online, on social media, in popular music, in art world press releases, and in the New York Times, decontextualized and meme-like, sometimes the stuff of conspiracy and outrage and at others the balm of empathy.
A Super-Simple, Non-Quantum Theory Of Eternal Consciousness
John Horgan considers the phenomenon of a philosopher dozing off at a conference (and himself dozing off while watching TV in bed) and arrives at the idea that consciousness may well be eternal – well, in effect, if not by strictest definition.