Category: ideas

“The idea is that the desire to counter racism might itself end up fomenting prejudice. Based on what we know about the human mind and the psychology of bias, should this ‘backlash’ explanation of the Trump Effect” – the marked rise in incidents of harassment and even assault since the election – “carry any weight?” Daniel Engber looks at the research.

No, not the “unlikeable” ones like Cersei Lannister on “Game of Thrones,” whose walk of shame partially redeems her, but the ones on dark comedies like “Fleabag” and “Transparent,” wherein the characters offer “a way of challenging audiences to confront their own biases against historically less sanctioned forms of female behavior.”

Fidel Castro was sidelined from power a decade before he died – and artists were still repressed and controlled. But his death “does mark a tremendous psychological milestone.”

Teju Cole takes note of Taryn Simon’s work, and makes marching orders for our time: “We don’t turn to history because it is demonstrably relevant, and we don’t look at art only because it is monumental or beautiful.”

‘Mom’ is now the highest form of flattery. Witness one Twitter response to a photo of Beyoncé with her daughter: “Beyoncé just ENDED your moms, moms mom, moms mom’s cousin, your moms mom’s cousin’s friend, and your moms mom’s cousin’s friends dog.”

“Mainstream economics is built on the premise that the economy is a machine-like system operating at equilibrium. … The system might experience shocks, but the result of all these minute decisions is that the economy eventually works its way back to a stable state. … But why not look at the economy in terms of the messy complexity of natural systems?”

“When the technology of the home was more like a tool to augment human muscle power – a place for the washing machine, the fridge, the boiler – the home was as a private, bounded space. Now technology is breaking down those boundaries. When parents worry about where their children are going (metaphorically) and to whom they’re talking on social media, they’re acknowledging that people can be at home, in their bedrooms, and yet somewhere else simultaneously. Young people seem to be most at home when they are on – or perhaps ‘in’ – their phones, flicking between apps, surfing their social networks.”

“Honestly, being a black man, I had thought that I had been marked enough,” writes George Yancy, a philosophy professor at Emory who is one of a couple hundred individuals that “advance leftist propaganda in the classroom,” according to a website launched by conservative youth group Turning Point USA.

In their main finding, the researchers report the ability to make connections between distant concepts was associated with “structural variation” of several specific brain regions, one of which “was connected to distant regions through long-range pathways.”

“A new study finds that, for some, logic- and evidence-based reasoning may as well have been commandments handed down from God. … Yeah, they’re looking at you, New Atheists.”