Category: ideas

“In 1998, the American Psychological Association appointed a new president, Dr. Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania. Up until this point, Seligman was best known for his work in the 1960s administering electric shocks to captive dogs, but in his new role as president, he was now changing tack. Seligman used his inaugural speech to the association to declare the grand opening of a whole new branch of psychology, to be known as ‘positive psychology.'”

“I didn’t do enough,” says Oskar Schindler at the end of Schindler’s List. “Is he right?,” asks Michael Mitchell. “According to consequentialism, it’s true: he didn’t do enough. Consequentialism is the moral theory that we are obligated to do whatever would have the best consequences. If that entails great sacrifice, then great sacrifice is what consequentialism demands we undertake. Since Schindler could have done more, he should have.”

“Where the human gaze goes, business soon follows.” When that gaze eventually shifted to the smartphone—portable, social, location-aware, always on—whatever last reserves of human attention were still left unexploited were suddenly on the table. The smartphone would become “the undisputed new frontier of attention harvesting in the twenty-first century, the attention merchants’ manifest destiny.”

“You mustn’t be fearful of being imaginative. You might seem foolish in the eyes of many, but you mustn’t be fearful of it, because it’s the thing that’s going to get you through all the times that are not so good.”

“There’s a critical misunderstanding of the over-used C word. The first thing most of us think of when we hear that someone is creative is: artist, poet, musician, or entrepreneur. That’s not to say that creative people don’t fall into those categories, but what I’m suggesting is that creativity is a state of mind rather than a set of skills in a particular area.”

“The choker is, on the one hand, simply one more way that the current culture has been looking back nostalgically to the ’90s. But they evoke much more than ’90s grunge: Chokers were common across ancient cultures, and cycled in and out of style during the most recent centuries in the West – prized for their ability both to conceal the neck and to highlight it. Today they most readily suggest the romantic (and the Romantic). But they also carry a note, visually slicing as they do across the most vulnerable part of the human body, of violence. And, with it, control.”

“Whereas before we might have tried to recall something on our own, now we don’t bother. As more information becomes available via smartphones and other devices, we become progressively more reliant on it in our daily lives.”