Category: ideas

“Ignoring the idea of willpower will sound absurd to most patients and therapists, but, as a practicing addiction psychiatrist and an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry, I’ve become increasingly skeptical about the very concept of willpower, and concerned by the self-help obsession that surrounds it. Countless books and blogs offer ways to “boost self-control,” or even to “meditate your way to more willpower,” but what’s not widely recognized is that new research has shown some of the ideas underlying these messages to be inaccurate.”

“The more technology multiplies, the more it amplifies instability. Things already don’t quite do what they claim. The fixes just make things worse. And so, ordinary devices aren’t likely to feel more workable and functional as technology marches forward. If anything, they are likely to become even less so. Technology is becoming a force that surrounds humans—but not necessarily in the service of human ends. Technology’s role has begun to shift, from serving human users to pushing them out of the way so that the technologized world can service its own ends.”

The movie, which used to be a cultural touchstone so potent that it made audiences understand that characters like Harry and Sally were perfect for each other, has fallen off in recent years. Is it because Americans don’t feel the shadow of WWII anymore?

Not to mention ISIS. But humans – especially writers – have a chance to do something about it: “By imagining, we create the potential for what might be. Religions are composed of stories precisely because of this potency. Stories have the power to liberate us from the tyranny of what was and is. We are all creators of fictions, and we all have a role to play in imagining our way out of the nostalgic traps strewn around us.”

It all started with Chaucer, and it makes sense. Calling a celebrity a star “emphasizes the role of the celebrity as a body both distant and accessible, gleaming and sparkling and yet reassuringly omnipresent. Stars have long suggested a kind of order—and orientation—within chaotic human lives. They have long hinted that there is something bigger, something beyond, something more.

With a nod to Hannah Arendt for her phrase “dark times,” the New York Times online column “The Stone” recaps the columns of 11 contributors who have addressed the issue over the past year.

“Calling something interesting is the height of sloppy thinking. Interesting is not descriptive, not objective, and not even meaningful. Interesting is a kind of linguistic connective tissue.”

One study suggests the brain may be hard-wired to respond to verse, while another reports creativity is associated not so much with one particular hemisphere, but rather with robust connections between the two.

Tim Parks: “How is it that we experience the world? How is it possible that the environment we live in, the objects we use and see, touch and taste, hear and smell, are both patently out there and simultaneously, it seems, in our heads? After four long conversations, … Riccardo Manzotti and I are no nearer to establishing what consciousness is or where it resides. Today, then, we have set ourselves a simple task: to review all the ways philosophers have supposed a subject might relate to and become conscious of an object.”

“The wonders of the Universe are under no obligation to make it easy for science-fiction writers to tell stories about them. The Universe is mostly empty space, and the distances between stars in galaxies, and between galaxies in the Universe, are incomprehensibly vast on human scales. Capturing the true scale of the Universe, while somehow tying it to human endeavours and emotions, is a daunting challenge for any science-fiction writer.”