Category: ideas

“Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it. Art can take something as dark as the Hay Institution for Girls, as hateful as that graffiti, and in applying the transfiguring power of ‘something else,’ it can give us the strength not to turn away and normalize, but to keep looking—and in doing so to question, provoke, understand, reject, change.”

Happy Scrooge is – frankly – a bit boring, but terrified Scrooge being dragged by chain-ridden Marley and all of those ghosts through the pit of despair his life has become? Oh heck yeah. You know you love it.

“Since the early 1980s schools have become ever more captivated by the idea that students must learn a set of generalised thinking skills to flourish in the contemporary world – and especially in the contemporary job market. Variously called ‘21st-century learning skills’ or ‘critical thinking’, the aim is to equip students with a set of general problem-solving approaches that can be applied to any given domain; these are lauded by business leaders as an essential set of dispositions for the 21st century. Naturally, we want children and graduates to have a set of all-purpose cognitive tools with which to navigate their way through the world. It’s a shame, then, that we’ve failed to apply any critical thinking to the question of whether any such thing can be taught.”

Using the second person, an interactive feature by Joanna Klein walks the reader through the hive, the hunt for pollen, the tastes and smells (powerful) and sights (not so much) and movements of apian existence.

Zoologist Antone Martinho: “Were I not an animal behaviour researcher, I would hardly notice; but because I am, I constantly ask myself: why do I treat my pets like thinking, conscious companions, and the ducklings in my lab like feathered robots? The reluctance of my field to engage seriously with animal consciousness is, I believe, holding back our efforts to truly understand their behaviour.”

Well, that depends. If you consider religion strictly a matter of belief, we can’t know. But if, like anthropologist Barbara J. King, you see religion as practice, there’s evidence.

“Perhaps contradictions are a necessary ingredient for triggering intellectual creativity. While most humans struggle to maintain a sense of psychological unity, contradictions produce destabilising breaches in the self. Whether conscious or unconscious, these fissures nourish creative inspiration, which can be interpreted as a way to resolve or sublimate internal oppositions. I believe this can be said of all domains of creation. Perhaps art, literature, science or philosophy wouldn’t be possible without intrapersonal contradictions and the desire to resolve them.”

“With the ubiquity of the internet and the rise of machine learning, a new kind of solution is beginning to take shape. The infrastructure of the web, built to link one resource to the next, was the beginning. The next wave of information systems promises to more deeply establish links between people, ideas, and artifacts that have, so far, remained out of reach—by drawing connections between information and objects that have come unmoored from context and history.”

“Two years ago, in an essay on the persistence of the Frankfurt School, I wrote, ‘If Adorno were to look upon the cultural landscape of the twenty-first century, he might take grim satisfaction in seeing his fondest fears realized.’ I spoke too soon. His moment of vindication is arriving now.”