A theory about why the 1982 movie, which is considered “bad” by most film critics, fascinates and educates young children, even though the themes are hardly childlike: “The possibility of being a single being, alone in the world, was deeply fascinating to me. Annie, the protagonist of the film, makes hard decisions several times in the movie. She’s the moral center of a film that is deeply, complicatedly female driven.”
Category: ideas
Feminist Science Fiction Writers Predicted This Future (And Far Bleaker Ones As Well)
“What makes The Handmaid’s Tale so terrifying is that everything that happens in it is plausible. In fact, everything – like the stratagem of the handmaids – has happened somewhere before. Everything in it has been praised by someone as the right, the good, the best, the only way to live.”
End Of History? The Much-Maligned Francis Fukuyama Was Right About Our Current Political Circumstances
Rarely read but often denigrated, it might be the most maligned, unfairly dismissed and misunderstood book of the post-war era. Which is unfortunate for at least one reason: Fukuyama might have done a better job of predicting the political turmoil that engulfed Western democracies in 2016 – from Brexit, to Trump, to the Italian Referendum – than anybody else.
Daniel Dennett, Scientist Of The Soul
“Dennett does not believe that we are ‘mere things.’ He thinks that we have souls, but he is certain that those souls can be explained by science. If evolution built them, they can be reverse-engineered. ‘There ain’t no magic there,’ he told me. ‘Just stage magic.'”
Where Did Thinkers Search For The Location Of The Human Soul Before Modern Neuroscience?
Daniel Suggs reviews the early history of the science of the soul in the Western world, from Vesalius to Donne to Marlowe to Overton to the New England doctor who determined (with methodology that wasn’t exactly rigorous or ethical) that the soul weighs 21 grams.
It Might Not Be Popular, But We Need To Defend Hierarchies (The Right Kind, Of Course)
“Hierarchy is an unfashionable thing to defend or to praise. British government ministers denounce experts as out of tune with popular feeling; both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders built platforms on attacking Washington elites; economists are blamed for not predicting the 2008 crash; and even the best established practice of medical experts, such as childhood vaccinations, are treated with resistance and disbelief. We live in a time when no distinction is drawn between justified and useful hierarchies on the one hand, and self-interested, exploitative elites on the other.”
How To Learn And Remember New Things As An Adult
Some of the things we most commonly do – re-reading (especially when we skim), highlighting sections of text – actually make things worse. Education researcher Ulrich Boser explains why, and offers some better suggestions, in this Q&A.
Is Our Reality Real? (Or Only The Reality We Create?)
“In the room we have a whirlwind of physical states. This whirlwind contains a lot more than a human being could ever perceive—atoms, neutrinos, photons, quarks, strings, quantum fields; a huge range of possibilities. When the body comes into the room, its sensory capacities carve out one possible subset of that whirlwind. Or, looked at the other way round, one possible set within the whirlwind finds, relative to the body, a suitable causal path along which to roll. So the table and the apple are born! My body brought them into existence in the sense that it selected them and only them from the whirlwind. Entirely ignoring all kinds of other stuff.”
Should Anything Offensive Be Off Limits For Comedy?
“Comedy requires passage into the ugly, uncomfortable areas of the human heart, particularly in a live forum. So, in the manner of jesters before medieval kings, comics need a temporary pass, a stay of execution, to do their work. Calling oneself a comedian is tantamount to issuing a personal-injury disclaimer. Like philosophical BDSM, the audience’s response gives signals to the performer in play.”
All Of Human Civilization Is Built On Code
In making this argument, Philip Auerswald is using a very broad definition of the word code – one that includes recipes and procedural protocols as well as binary numbers and computer languages.