Category: ideas

But, writer Delia Ephon notes, this isn’t a romantic comedy. A cancer diagnosis intruded into the story.

And, honestly, GIFs are living their best lives right now. “Twitter has a GIF button and even Apple added GIF search to its iOS messaging app. Such mainstream approval would have seemed unthinkable even a decade ago, when GIFs had the cultural cachet of blinking text and embedded MIDI files. But today they’re ubiquitous.”

“At its most general, the hard problem of consciousness is the expression of a familiar kind of puzzlement or mental cramp. We know that the brain is causally responsible, in some way or another, for consciousness – but we remain utterly baffled as to how its fatty, yoghurty matter could be up to the task. The puzzlement is not restricted to philosophers, neuroscientists or those who know a lot about the brain.”

“It may be that our sense of the importance of comic timing comes more from how we perceive jokes than from how they’re delivered. And, for comedians, the timing after the punch line” – as opposed to before, which is what most laypeople assume – “is what really counts.” Thomas MacMillan explains.

“Do you want to win that tennis match? It is outside of your control. But to play the best game you can is under your control. Do you want your partner to love you? It is outside of your control. But there are plenty of ways you can choose to show your love to your partner – and that is under your control. Do you want a particular political party to win the election? It is outside of your control (unless you’re Vladimir Putin!) But you can choose to engage in political activism, and you can vote.”

Philosopher Peter Boghossian and mathematician James Lindsay clearly hoped that their fake gender-studies paper, “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct,” would go down in history as an Alan Sokal-style triumph. Phil Torres explains why their hoax proves a lot less than they’d like to think it does (and proves one thing they’d probably rather it didn’t).

Utopian visions are powerful precisely because, being nowhere, they aren’t constrained by present reality but rather point the way to a desirable future. “Utopia’s ‘nowhereness’ incites the search for it. Utopia describes a state of impossible perfection which nevertheless is in some genuine sense not beyond the reach of humanity. It is here if not now.”

Late last week, two (male) academics revealed that they had written a bogus gender-studies paper titled “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct” and gotten it published in a social sciences journal. An Alan Sokal caper for the 21st century? Not necessarily. Digg explains what’s going on here.