Category: ideas

“In philosophy, since Socrates (a troll before there ever was an internet), the answer has been ‘very bad.’ If you find you believe two inconsistent propositions you need to do something about it. You owe a theory. But theories themselves tend to be confusing, unsatisfactory or both.”

“In any parlance, the specific meaning of ‘normal’ has important consequences, especially if it is given a privileged position in the world. Anything that veers – from having green eyes or hearing voices to living with hydrocephalus – would be abnormal in one sense or another: uncommon, rare, atypical, potentially inadequate, suboptimal or deficient in some way – and in need of being brought back to some norm. Yet, it could be controversial, or just plain odd, to pathologise such variations; especially if they are functional in some way.”

“The virtues of digital turn out to be the vices as well. Having all the music on earth at your instant disposal turns out to be almost the same as having none; Spotify’s playlists show people picking the same tunes over and over. Digital life’s too self-absorbed—either we evolve quickly away from the social primates we have always been or else we will quietly suffer from the solipsism inherent in staring at ourselves reflected in a screen. It’s too jumpy; concentration, from which all that is worthwhile emerges, is the great loss.”

You may not know the term, but you’re familiar with “visual pareidolia” – it’s when you see an animal in a Rorschach blot or the Virgin Mary in a slice of toast. It happens with sounds, too – as when some parents heard in a Fisher-Price doll’s giggles and coos the sentence “Islam is the light.” Philip Jaekl explains how it happens.

Two cognitive researchers explain how people’s conceptions of what’s average or typical and what’s ideal bleed into each other and change what gets considered “normal.”

If nothing else, Brexit and Trump are endless sources of new words: “Trumponomics (the president’s economic policy), trumpertantrum (angry early-morning tweeting laced with innuendo and falsehood) and trumpkin (a pumpkin carved to resemble the former TV host) are among neologisms added to a watchlist of words that may be fast-tracked into the Oxford English Dictionary. “

Women like Audre Lorde and Clara Hale didn’t just affect New York; they “likewise reshaped the ways in which nearly all members of society think about our relationships to one another. The legacy of these pioneers was on display last weekend all over the world, where humans of every gender, age and persuasion took to the streets.”

For instance: “Religious art from the 16th and 17th centuries includes gorily realistic sculptures of the dead Christ covered with blood and faces of the Virgin apparently shedding wet tears: to animate such statues was just another way to awe and move the Catholic pious.”

Newspapers sold out across France when Camus’ book The Rebel was published – and Sartre’s newspaper trashed it. “The split between the two friends was a media sensation. … It’s hard to imagine an intellectual feud capturing that degree of public attention today, but, in this disagreement, many readers saw the political crises of the times reflected back at them. … If you are thoroughly committed to an idea, are you compelled to kill for it? What price for justice? What price for freedom?”

“If evolution (a word Darwin used sparingly in the book) occurs randomly, without the intervention of divine will and protection—natural selection, after all—then change itself can occur not just for the better, but for the worse. The world, so wonderfully capable of evolution, is just as capable of the opposite. It was a troubling idea; it was also, potentially, a liberating one.”