Category: ideas

If white-collar workers are told the downtown office is forever optional, some will take their superstar-city jobs out of superstar cities. That much is obvious. But these shifts, even if they are initially moderate, could lead to more surprising and significant changes to America’s cultural, economic, and political future. – The Atlantic

If we want to trace bullshit back to its origins, we have to look a lot further back than any human civilization. Bullshit has its origins in deception more broadly, and animals have been deceiving one another for hundreds of millions of years. – Lithub

Groups of students have variously described the composition of Princeton’s faculty and its “institutional culture” as “pillars of its oppressive past,” declared that their education failed to prepare them to vanquish racism, and urged a “comprehensive transformation” of curriculum, programming, and faculty. More notable, roughly 350 faculty members and staff signed an open letter, published on July 4, that set forth nearly 50 demands. – The Atlantic

Beyond just matching up bogus claims with evidence to the contrary, the startup treats the fact-checking process like an assembly line, with an algorithm prioritizing and doling out tasks. As a basic example, one step might involve finding the source of a rumor, while another might involve researching the claim. Logically’s system can handle some of these tasks automatically, but it can also hand out assignments to human fact-checkers based on their area of expertise. – Fast Company

David Bell argues that charismatic leaders were a key product of the age of Revolution, which created the ideal political and cultural conditions for a new kind of civic heroism to emerge. It flourished initially in response to the development of print technologies, and the radical Enlightenment’s belief that governments should be founded not on the divine right of kings, but on the principles of secularism and popular sovereignty. It then proliferated with the overthrow of monarchies and the founding of republics, the escalation of warfare on a titanic scale, as well as the cultivation of romantic sensibilities, which encouraged citizens to embrace powerful emotions about their leaders – feelings of admiration, devotion and even love. – Times Literary Supplement

Let’s face it: we’ve all had second thoughts about language. Hardly a day goes by when we don’t stumble for words, stagger into misunderstandings, or struggle with a double negative. It’s a frightfully cumbersome way to express ourselves. If language is such a slippery medium, perhaps it is time to replace it with something more dependable. Why not cut out the middleman and connect brains directly? – Psyche

Writing for the sake of publication—instead of for the sake of being read—is academia’s version of “teaching to the test.” The result is papers few actually want to read. First, the writing is hypercomplex. Yes, the thinking is also complex, but the writing in professional journals regularly contains a layer of complexity beyond what is needed to make the point. It is not edited for style and readability. Most significantly of all, academic writing is obsessed with other academic writing—with finding a “gap in the literature” as opposed to answering a straightforwardly interesting or important question. – The Point

Given the degree to which workers lack autonomy and are at the mercy of arbitrary and capricious decisions by their employer, republican liberty is at risk when it comes to the employer-employee relationship. Without a union, employees are subject to all kinds of arbitrary treatment. With a union, employees have some protection against this. – Aeon

The “free speech” argument can be a useful tactic. But it’s not necessarily a successful one in the long term. Overusing it can turn real debates into insoluble meta-arguments with no room for compromise, driving a self-perpetuating dynamic in which one party exudes a feigned and slyly provocative equilibrium while the other becomes increasingly bitter and confrontational. – Washington Post